Take My Commas—Please
Most editors are probably familiar with the rule that commas should be used to set off nonrestrictive appositives and that no commas should be used around restrictive appositives. (In Chicago 16, it’s under 6.23.) A restrictive appositive specifies which of a group of possible referents you’re talking about, and it’s thus integral to the sentence. […]
What Descriptivism Is and Isn’t
A few weeks ago, the New Yorker published what is nominally a review of Henry Hitchings’ book The Language Wars (which I still have not read but have been meaning to) but which was really more of a thinly veiled attack on what its author, Joan Acocella, sees as the moral and intellectual failings of […]
Guest Post at Logophilius
Today I have a guest post about rules and style choices at Andy Hollandbeck's blog Logophilius. Go take a look, and while you’re there, check out the rest of his site.
Grammar and Morality
Lately there’s been an article going around titled “The Real George Zimmerman’s Really Bad Grammar”, by Alexander Nazaryan. I’m a week late getting around to blogging about it, but at the risk of wading into a controversial topic with a possibly tasteless post, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the arguments […]
How to Write Better
I’m sharing my advice with aspiring superb writers in partnership with Grammarly grammar checker. This isn’t going to be my typical sort of post, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on my own writing and the lessons I’ve learned from graduate school and from working on my own blog. There’s […]
Rules, Evidence, and Grammar
In case you haven’t heard, it’s National Grammar Day, and that seemed as good a time as any to reflect a little on the role of evidence in discussing grammar rules. (Goofy at Bradshaw of the Future apparently had the same idea.) A couple of months ago, Geoffrey Pullum made the argument in this post […]
No Dice
If you’ve ever had to learn a foreign language, you may have struggled to memorize plural forms of nouns. German, for example, has about a half a dozen ways of forming plurals, and it’s a chore to remember which kind of plural each noun takes. English, by comparison, is ridiculously easy. Here’s how it works […]
Here’s You a Benefactive Dative
Yesterday I heard an interesting construction that I’ve only heard of once before. Several months ago a coworker of mine was talking about a family reunion she’d been to, at which one of her cousins had offered her an apple and said, “Here’s you an apple.” I’d never heard anything like it before, but I’d […]
Most Awarded
The other day a friend of mine complained about the use of the phrase “most-awarded” in a commercial for the Jeep Cherokee, which called it the “most-awarded SUV ever.” It bothered him, he said, because “they are saying lots of Cherokees get given away as awards, but that’s not what they mean.” I was surprised—I […]
However
Several weeks ago, Bob Scopatz asked in a comment about the word however, specifically whether it should be preceded by a comma or a semicolon when it’s used between two clauses. He says that a comma always seems fine to him, but apparently this causes people to look askance at him. The rule here is […]