Arrant Pedantry

Month: March 2015

March 5, 2015

No, Online Grammar Errors Have Not Increased by 148%

Yesterday a post appeared on QuickandDirtyTips.com (home of Grammar Girl’s popular podcast) that appears to have been written by a company called Knowingly, which is promoting its Correctica grammar-checking tool. They claim that “online grammar errors have increased by 148% in nine years”. If true, it would be a pretty shocking claim, but the numbers […]

READ MORE
SHARE:
Grammar, Usage 6 Replies to “No, Online Grammar Errors Have Not Increased by 148%”
March 4, 2015

Why Descriptivists Are Usage Liberals

Outside of linguistics, the people who care most about language tend to be prescriptivists—editors, writers, English teachers, and so on—while linguists and lexicographers are descriptivists. “Descriptive, not prescriptive!” is practically the linguist rallying cry. But we linguists have done a terrible job of explaining just what that means and why it matters. As I tried […]

READ MORE
SHARE:
Descriptivism, Prescriptivism 11 Replies to “Why Descriptivists Are Usage Liberals”
You are here: Page 1