By Geoffrey Pullum. Mention an interest in grammar education to most people and they will assume you are concerned about incorrect use of English. What concerns me, by contrast, is the incompetence of those who pontificate about it and set quizzes on it. Google fetches more than 300,000 hits for the term "grammar quiz"; yet if quizzes on chemistry were as uninformed as those on grammar, they would ask silly questions on peripheral topics (“Who is the Bunsen burner named after?”), and would make no reference to the periodic table, or atoms or molecules. The web’s grammar quizzes deal in minor pieces of puristic flotsam with roots in dimly understood 18th-century grammatical analysis. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. History is so annoying.
Just when you gird your loins to pen an eloquent article about the fine distinctions of language, threading your way among the thickets of the prescriptivist debate to request that we all pause to acknowledge what might be lost when such distinctions collapse, history comes along and thumbs its snotty nose at you. I refer to the difference in meaning accorded the adjectives disinterested and uninterested, of which the noun forms are (or should be) disinterest and uninterest. More...

By Allan Metcalf. I’m looking at a little blue pin, the size of a quarter, with the words FREE SPEECH in two lines of capitals and below them the abbreviation F.S.M. in smaller capitals curving around the bottom. That’s all. But half a century ago, when I and many others wore it during the fall semester 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley, it made a significant contribution to the success of the most successful political campaign I have ever experienced: the Free Speech Movement. It was created, flourished, succeeded, and then because of its success quietly faded away, all in a few months time. More...