Category Archives: Language

Scientific terms list for spell-checkers/spelling dictionaries

Posted on December 24, 2012

[UPDATE: This post is out of date. Please see my static page Scientific word list for spell-checkers/spelling dictionaries for up-to-date information about these scientific word lists. I mean, the links to the files custom_scientific_US.txt and custom_scientific_UK.txt below will take you … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Language, Science, Writing | 3 Comments

Sub rosa

Posted on December 13, 2012

There is a fairly strange episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, from the last season, called “Sub Rosa”, that I only saw for the first time sometime in college, in which Beverly Crusher is basically seduced by this spirit … Continue reading →

Posted in Entertainment, Language, TV | Leave a comment

Stop suggesting rewording or rearranging when word order is not the problem

Posted on September 29, 2012

A recent comment on my post about en dashes, in which the commenter offered one very helpful fix but otherwise tried and failed to improve the clarity of several phrases by rewriting the phrases altogether, is only the latest example … Continue reading →

Posted in Blagging, Grammar, Language, Writing | Leave a comment

Wise thoughts on “literally” vs. “figuratively”

Posted on April 22, 2012

In the Salon article by Mary Elizabeth Williams, which I’ve already written two posts about but I promise this is the last one, this comment by machineghost struck me as entirely reasonable and wise: So the problem with literally becoming … Continue reading →

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Anti-Hopefully crusaders are hopeless

Posted on April 21, 2012

Some of the comments to the (in)famous Mary Elizabeth Williams column that I blagged about yesterday are so stupid they practically drool. It’s a shame I didn’t read this column (or, actually, its comments) earlier, because I could have ranted … Continue reading →

Posted in Grammar, Language, Morans | 1 Comment

Any writer who rails against sentential Hopefully and the passive voice in general is not worth listening to

Posted on April 20, 2012

Look. I sympathize with Mary Elizabeth Williams. I really do. I hate it when people misuse a word, and I hate the idea of English speakers separated by time and space meaning different things when they use the same words … Continue reading →

Posted in Language, Morans, Writing | 2 Comments

Bryan Garner interview in VICE magazine

Posted on April 8, 2012

I liked several passages of this interview of Bryan A. Garner in VICE magazine: As we saw the rise of literacy over the next few hundred years, especially in the beginning of the 18th century, the language became relatively more … Continue reading →

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Quote of the day

Posted on April 7, 2012

It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. William Zinsser, Writing … Continue reading →

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Superstitions and fetishes make for bad writing and editing

Posted on April 5, 2012

Scientific editors are a difficult group to deal with. Most of them are either bad writers or not experts on the topic they’re editing at a given time, or both. Either shortcoming often leads them to make unnecessary, unwise, or … Continue reading →

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No, in fact, languages don’t want that

Posted on January 24, 2012

Because they are incapable of wanting anything. Earlier I remarked that Geoffrey Pullum, Ph.D., professional linguist, ardent descriptivist, and language blagger extraordinaire surely didn’t really think this but wrote it in Language Log posts for rhetorical effect: that languages want … Continue reading →

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On correctness, ambiguity, and precision in language

Posted on January 17, 2012

In the linguistics blagosphere last week, prescriptivists got all indignant because some British company I’d never heard of, Waterstone’s, dropped the apostrophe from its name, and descriptivists got all agitated at the prescriptivists for making undue proclamations about correctness, rules, … Continue reading →

Posted in Language | 1 Comment

“Times” and “folds”

Posted on January 15, 2012

Bill Walsh is absolutely, completely, 100%, unequivocally, and in all other ways right in his position on the meanings of “times” and “fold” in his recent disagreement that is as much mathematical as it is semantic. If I start with … Continue reading →

Posted in Grammar, Language | 1 Comment

Young American female vowel shift

Posted on January 14, 2012

In a recent post about a different topic, Bill Walsh mentions some annoying vowel shifts exhibited by young-ish American females. These mainly involve changing the short e to the short u sound, so that “desk”, “test”, and “better” become “dusk”, … Continue reading →

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Sure vs. certain

Posted on September 29, 2010

Without reading the title of this post, if you were asked to give a synonym of “sure”, wouldn’t your answer most likely be “certain”? And vice versa? In most cases, these words are identical and interchangeable. But these cases are … Continue reading →

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