Stack up with?
Stack up with, or against?
Understated or overstated
It cannot be overstated that “it cannot be understated” will most likely be understood as infelicitous phrasing.
Positive anymore on the screen
“Well, anymore you’re always busy.”
You and *I, you and me
I was driving when I said it: “people like you and I.” And I couldn’t believe that I had said it.
Ruth Martin, stickler
“Fine grammar for a college graduate – ‘not me.’”
Geoffrey Pullum explains it all
“Pullum constantly insists that all modern lexicographers, as well as all grammarians not called Pullum, are wrong about everything, which lends his book a slightly crazed tone of ‘Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying dictionaries?’”
In it and of it?
“Do you have any pens that need filled?”
A review: Anne Curzan, Says Who?
Again and again I found myself at odds with her perspective. Part of what put me off, wrongly or rightly, is the book's relentless cheeriness: the “kinder, funner ” of the title, the too-frequent use of exclamation points. A larger problem is Curzan’s division of the individual psyche into “grammando” and “wordie,” both a matter not of a speaker/writer but of a listener/reader responding to other people’s words.
The Internets, sometimes wonderful
A flurry of visits from the Czech Republic.
John McWhorter on prepositions
John McWhorter in The New York Times, stating what ought to be obvious: “The ‘Rule’ Against Ending Sentences With Prepositions Has Always Been Silly.”
Efforting, or effort as a verb
How to make it clear that someone is trying hard or that someone is trying too hard? By avoiding the use of effort as a verb. I hereby pronounce the verb effort a skunked term.
Forecast, *forecasted
From Apple’s Weather widget: “Light rain forecasted,” not “forecast.”
How to improve writing (no. 115)
One of Joe and my favorite parts about being on the campaign trail is meeting supporters just like you.
Whom is not calling
In yesterday’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, the clue “Receptionist’s pronoun” takes the answer WHOM. The answer appears to play on the well-known formula of telephone etiquette: “Whom should I say is calling?” The pronoun who, not whom is what’s appropriate there. I think the puzzle’s constructor, Matthew Sewell, must know that, but not every solver will.
Dustin pronouns
In today’s Dustin: Hayden speaks out against standardized tests and learns a valuable lesson about pronouns.
Scotch, bourbon, and radio English
“But the Manleighs are a cinch to want Scotch. People in show business, you know what I mean, those kind always drink Scotch.”
Oops
“If me and my co-counsel”: a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, in a televised hearing from a Fulton County courthouse just now.
Linus’s whom
Linus corrects Sally.
The Times like
“Like” or “such as”?
A CMOS quiz
From The Chicago Manual of Style, a new quiz: Other Languages.
Five-and-ten, five-and-dime
Usage.
Pleaded or pled?
Joyce Vance thinks, wrongly, that “pleaded” is wrong.
MSNBC, sheesh
Chris Jansing, earlier this afternoon: “The Washington Post reports that Jack Smith is honing in on Trump’s post-election fundraising,” &c.
E.g. , i.e. , etc.
The Chicago Manual of Style explains their use.
“In real time”
An inane phrase.
From an interview with Bryan Garner
How did a teenager fall in love with books about English usage?
Red Pen
The first episode (forty-four minutes) is ostensibly about who and whom, but it’s really two friends talking, and their talking goes all over the place: Christopher Columbus, bad reviews of the Sistine Chapel, commercialism at Egypt’s pyramids, a Geocities fan page for Rage Against the Machine, Jay McInerney’s tweets, and looting at Duane Reade stores, with none of those topics touching upon who or whom.
The reason is not because
If “the reason is because” is far less common in writing, if it’s likely to stand out to many a reader as a known redundancy, it’s in a writer’s interest to change because to that. It doesn’t matter what Robert Frost did. Or Jane Austen.
Recently updated
“As good of a” — someone fixed it.
A critical reader
I’m a member of the panel of critical readers for the forthcoming fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage.