LINGUAPHILES & SESQUIPEDALIANS

Comment

Comment by Richard ∑wald on April 6, 2012 at 8:44pm

What does it mean when a discussion is "featured"?

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 6, 2012 at 8:06pm

"I could care fewer" (and other NGD musings)

Apparently I have completely lost my sensitivity to the Timeliness Mandate in which all true journalists believe. Am I rebelling against all those years of deadlines, or am I just slower on the draw these days? Whatever; I may be 10 days late (or 355 days early), but I’m still going to offer a couple of comments on National Grammar Day, since I was otherwise occupied when it rolled around way back on March 4.

 

First, of all the celebratory haiku and faux-haiku selected by the NGD judges in this year's contest, the one I found totally irresistible was a mischievous rebuke to humorless prescriptivism submitted by Tom Freeman (no relation!):

People shouldn't say
"I could care less" when they mean
"I could care fewer"

Words to live by. [continue]

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 6, 2012 at 8:01pm

NYT BLOG: DRAFT

Draft features essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing — from the comma to the tweet to the novel — and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age.

Comment by Alan Libert on February 27, 2012 at 5:34am

Hi everyone, I just joined this group. I am a linguistics lecturer in Newcastle, Australia, though I am from New York City.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on November 14, 2011 at 1:31pm

My new favorite Wikipedia page: Latin Profanity.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on October 8, 2011 at 6:59pm

Colour me prefixed Following up last week’s comments about words starting in en- and em- for imbuing something with colour, Andrew Palmer and Dave Cook supplied the first sentence of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native: “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.”

Read more.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on September 23, 2011 at 5:47pm

That is funny, but I am impressed at how erudite and courteous they are. If that has been posted on a US news site everyone would be accusing one another of being a socialist.

Comment by qıƃ ɟ ǝıɔɐɹʇ on September 23, 2011 at 5:06pm

re: linguaphiles at The Guardian, food fighting conundra, hahaha I love this shit

Comment by Keith Brian Johnson on September 22, 2011 at 1:24am

I hope it's only a *small* debate.  I understand wanting--and have argued for--the retention of standards of English usage over time; however, where meaning is clearly unaffected and where either form will be (or at least should be) understood by any reasonably proficient English speaker, I should think we would give people a pass if they used the "wrong" plural.  Aside from that, of course, is whether or not "conundrum" has the right etymology to properly be pluralized "conundra," which is a question I am not qualified to answer.

Comment by annet on September 21, 2011 at 9:20pm

Today I looked up the plural of conundrum.  There is a big debate about whether it is conundrums or conundra.

The comments are very funny if you feel like reading some linguaphiles going at it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-5253,00.html

 

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