By Geoffrey Pullum. When working with my students—Germans and other nonnative English speakers—on papers and theses, I can often spot those who have taken an academic writing class by the number of conjunctive adverbs that litter the work. My impulse is to cut all these therefores, consequentlys, and additionallys, though I recognize their appeal. When I’m working as a journalist, I often need to write quick articles that rely heavily on conjunctive adverbs and conjunctions (but, nor) to pull readers through the twists and turns of the story; the more time I’ve got to craft a piece, the more confident I become in barer sentences to provide that drama. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type. The EssayTyper home page presents a box saying. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. Next time you’re at the diner for breakfast, try ordering “Zeppelins in a cloud.” That’s slang for sausages and mashed potatoes, inspired by the airships used for spying and bombing during World War I, according to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. The distinctive flying machines “must have captured the imaginations of soldiers,” the editors say. But Oxford’s word sleuths have been able to trace the use of the phrase only back to 1925, when it turned up in Edward Fraser and John Gibbons’s Soldier & Sailor Words. So the OED’s lexicographers have put out an appeal to the public, asking for help in hunting down earlier uses of “Zeppelins in a cloud” and a handful of other terms “related to or coined during the war.” The Great War appeals list includes “shell shock,” “camouflage,” “trench foot,” and “demob,” along with words not often heard by modern ears: “conchie” (a conscientious objector), for instance, or “jusqu’auboutiste” (someone who fights to the bitter end, from the French “jusqu’au bout”). Another featured word, “skive” (“to avoid work”), remains in circulation in Britain but doesn’t seem to have invaded American English. More...