The Case of the Sinister Buttocks

By Geoffrey Pullum. The story behind this strange sentence was first told by Times Higher Education and has since been summarized (often inaccurately) by more than 7,000 other news sources. Lucy Ferriss alluded to it here on Lingua Franca last week. Its reference to musicians and liturgies might suggest a musical or religious theme. But no, this sentence, in a senior thesis submitted by an undergraduate to a London-area university, purported to be about business information systems. More...