By William Germano. The recent controversy over the young composer Jonas Tarm turns on the eleventh-hour discovery, or recognition, that his “March to Oblivion” (“Marsh u Nebuttya,” in a transliteration from Ukrainian) incorporates unplayable music — unplayable not because of its difficulty but because of its use of musical quotation. More...
Must We Mean What We Quote?
Swinging for His Supper
By Geoffrey Pullum. The Chronicle’s strict profanity policies, as I explained last year, bar mentioning offensive or obscene words, even in linguistic discussions where the details are crucial. Asterisk-respelling tricks are unapproved under the New York Times style guidelines that we follow. More...
Ineluctable Modality of the Visible
By Lucy Ferriss. I’m always coming late to the party. Over the weekend, traveling through Arizona with a clogged computer, I stopped in at the Apple store, 12 minutes late for my appointment at the Genius Bar. They hold the appointments for 10 minutes, after which you go into the queue. More...
And Now ‘This’
By Ben Yagoda. The most popular answer was this: “There’s nothing grammatically or syntactically wrong with starting a sentence with ‘this.’ It’s essential, however, that it’s clear what the ‘this’ is referring to.” More...
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