Clik here to view.
‘A Piece of Cake’
It started with an email from my eclectic friend Wes Davis. He said he’d been reading Tinkerbelle, by, he told me, “Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who, in 1965, took a leave...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thugs Like Us
A tweet by Questlove, the drummer for The Roots. In a press conference a couple of days after the 2014 Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who had made rather obnoxiously...
View ArticleTo Be or Not to Be: Needs and Wants
“The world’s elderly need fed, bathed, their dentures or teeth cleaned, catheters changed, etc.,” a student of mine wrote in a recent paper. And so they do. But does that grammar need changed? Not if...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Cheeky Nando’s’
Humility is always a good thing. I got a dose of it recently, courtesy of a BuzzFeed article posted to Facebook by a friend of mine, Siobhan Wagner, a journalist who was born in the U.S, but has been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Honor and a Horror
Brooklyn Beckham, the 16-year-old son of the soccer star David Beckham and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, met Professor Stephen Hawking during a day in Cambridge recently. Brooklyn put a photo of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tweeting Prepositions
Toward the end of NPR’s Planet Money podcast last week, the host, Jacob Goldstein, said: “You can tweet at us at ‘planetmoney.’ You can tweet at me at ‘jacobgoldstein.’” In March, Secretary of Defense...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nibbling Away
What’s a nibble? You’d know the answer — or at least one answer — if you’d had the good fortune to attend the combined conferences of the Dictionary Society of North America and Studies in the History...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Busy B’s at ‘DARE’
What’s new at the Dictionary of American Regional English? Boneless cats, for one. Badgers and back-budgers. Beach-walks, bodegas, (cellar) bugs, and beelers. The six-volume dictionary has a continuing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revealing American Speech
Sojourner Truth’s first language was Dutch. If you want to become an expert on the English language in North America, and maybe teach it too, a good place to start is with the American Dialect...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crisis Management and Proper Usage
E.B. White I learned something frightening yesterday. Just by chance, really. I happened to discover that in the syllabus for a course on crisis management at a noted law school (a sound and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Great Punkin Controversy
Starbucks watchers were taken aback last month when the company made a surprise announcement about its standard-bearing fall beverage. This year, for the first time in its 12-year history, a Pumpkin...
View ArticleClik here to view.
So, NPR Voice, Ya Know …
Ira Glass at Carnegie Hall(Photo by Brighterorange via Wikimedia Commons) I was frankly a little disappointed to read Teddy Wayne’s recent New York Times piece “‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
American Stars and Hearts
If Twitter users want to respond to a tweet, they have three options: reply to it, retweet it, or mark it with a symbol of approval. Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has begun changing that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Unsuitability of English
Utrecht, Holland— My mission in this pleasant central Holland town: giving a keynote address at the 25th anniversary conference of Sense (originally the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors, now...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Let’s Call the Whole Thing ‘Often’
How did Robert Frost pronounce often? I was listening the other day to “Reply All,” a podcast about the Internet, and P.J. Vogt, the reporter/host, had occasion to say the word often. I was pretty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Digital ‘DARE’ Update: Half-Price Holiday Special
Illustration by Ellen Winkler for The Chronicle OK, word lovers. Here’s the perfect gift for yourself, or any other logophile: A whole year of the complete online Dictionary of American Regional...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘Hey’ Now
Hey, if you don’t mind, listen to the first 20 seconds or so of this conversation between National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro and Gene Demby: If you didn’t care to listen, or experienced technical...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!
The tiddly oggie is actually of English origin, but it typifies the Australian penchant for diminutives and abbreviations. I’ve been in Australia for two weeks now, and all I can say is the people here...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Oh, Commas
As the self-appointed watcher of commas, known to some (OK, known to myself) as The Comma Maven, I naturally was concerned when I saw the provisional title of my friend Craig Pittman’s forthcoming book...
View ArticleWassup, Wazzock?
You may have caught this Budweiser ad during the Super Bowl. Dame Helen Mirren sits before a burger, is served a Bud (not bloody likely), and counsels, in strong language, against driving drunk....
View Article