AP Quiz Top Two Anathemas
On March 4 this year, National Grammar Day, the AP Stylebook editors tweeted a question for their readers: What grammar […]
Shakespeare—for All Time
According to T. S. Eliot, April was :the cruellest month.” For me, April is Shakespeare’s month, a time to reread […]
How to Pronounce the digraph AE in English
In English, the digraph ae functions chiefly as a suffix to denote the plural of Latin borrowings that retain a […]
The Preposition “Amid”
This post was prompted by a headline in the Washington Post: US deports former Nazi guard whose wartime role was […]
Uses of “Rhetoric”
Rhetoric is one of those academic words that has migrated into the popular vocabulary and is frequently used as if […]
Words in the News: tropism, coalface, logorrhea and parrhesia
Not since I read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy have I accumulated so many words in my reading that are new […]
“Penpointing” and Other Near-Misses in the Media
Penpointing for pinpointing In my part of the world, many speakers have a hard time hearing the difference between the […]
Proofreading and Its Pitfalls
Every writer has had the experience of submitting a piece of writing in the certainty that it is free of […]
Calques: Linguistic Immigrants in English
English vocabulary includes thousands of words that originated in languages other than Old English. Some of these linguistic immigrants never […]
Sarcastic vs. Sardonic vs. Facetious
Reader ApK has asked for a discussion of the words sarcastic, sardonic, and facetious— all examples of verbal irony. verbal […]
Epistemology vs Agnotology
Once upon a time, I encountered the word epistemology and its forms only in academic writing. Lately, I’ve been seeing […]
“Become” and a Question of Syntax
A sentence in a biographical piece in the Washington Post about the gifted librettist Randy Rainbow got me thinking about […]