Word of the day: fanboy
Many a teacher will know fanboys as a mnemonic to help students remember the seven coordinating conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.
“Have loved”
A close reading of Kim Potter’s letter of resignation, by Lauren Michele Jackson.
Conjugation?
“I googled [blank].” Okay. But what if one uses DuckDuckGo?
Review: Word by Word
Kory Stamper’s Word by Word does for lexicography what Mary Norris’s Between You & Me does for copyediting: it makes visible the work, the worker, and the workplace.
Recently updated
A 1795 source for the ill-considered prohibition on sentence-ending “it .”
Opt out is not a transitive verb
“She opted her third-grade son out of the tests.”
Acción Ortográfica Quito
Diéresis, Tilde, and Coma, correcting graffiti in Quito.
Recently updated
More evidence that ending a sentence with “it” is acceptable.
Ending a sentence with it
I’ve been told of other such rules: many students come to college believing that they must never begin a sentence with and, but, or because. The it-rule though is new to me.
To adjective, to adverb, to verb
From xkcd.
DFW, “Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work”
“Pedantry is always tiresome, but it’s especially tiresome when the pedant doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
Forward.
An elliptical form of the hortatory subjunctive.
Geoffrey Pullum on nouns
Linguist Geoffrey Pullum on the inadequacy of traditional definitions of a noun.
“I changed the Will to Shall”
Pete Seeger, on the development of “We Shall Overcome.”
Were and was
An update to one of the most popular posts on Orange Crate Art.
Singular "they"
"I found myself yesterday realizing that I can make a little room in my life for singular they, seeing as I had already made such room without realizing it."
Pullum on Strunk and White
"Pullum's take on Strunk and White involves a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading."
"Professionally-ran"
Ugh.
Orange Crate Art: Obama's I
My guess is that the "I" is a matter of long-standing habit, which also explains why I still say "stove" for "oven."
Chicago Style Q&A
The Q & A section of The Chicago Manual of Style Online