By William Germano. The Shakespeare world has been abuzz recently with news of a 1580 copy of Baret’s Alvearie, a four-language dictionary, heavily annotated and, according to its owners, possibly by Shakespeare’s own hand. There has been much in the press, popular and professional, on the plausibility of the claim. Jennifer Howard has covered the story in these pages. Adam Gopnik has used the event as the basis of his recent New Yorker meditation on the inexhaustible cult of Shakespeare. More...

By Rose Jacobs. You should have been reading this post yesterday. That, at least, was the plan a week ago, before William Germano and I traded slots—a move our editor forgot, because she sent an email on Thursday politely prodding me for copy. At first, I panicked: Could I rearrange my busy Friday schedule to get her something before the weekend? If not, would she mind editing it out-of-hours? Then I remembered the switch, and so wrote back: “I thought Bill and I swapped spots, putting me down for May 6?”
And then, well then, I spent some time regretting my punctuation. More...

By Allan Metcalf. “Ssshhhhh: Put the Kibosh on Annoying Twitter Users Without Them Knowing,” reads a headline on the Entrepreneur  website (May 2).
“Rangers Looking to Put Kibosh On Flyers’ Season In Game 6” (they did, in Game 7) says the website of CBS New York (April 29)
“Are Your Board Advisors Putting the Kibosh on Your Biz Dev?” asks the B2C website (May 1). More...

By Ben Yagoda. In eight years, we’ve gone from Kerry to Perry. The “Kerry” would be John, who, in 2006, said this in a speech to a group of students:
“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Kerry staffers’ damage control on the line—which many people took as insulting to current, former, and future troops—wasn’t stellar. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Professor Stefan Collini of the University of Cambridge says in a recent review article in Prospect Magazine:
For some time now, it has been customary to label those who write about grammar and usage as either prescriptivists or descriptivists. The former think there are “right” and “wrong” ways to say or write, while the latter claim that we can only record how people actually use language, since any widespread successful usage is, ipso facto, “right.”
He is right that this inept caricature has been familiar for decades: It’s the dichotomy that I discussed in 2005 under the heading “Everything is correct” versus “nothing is relevant”; it is identical with E.B. White’s distinction between “the modern liberal of the English Department, the anything-goes fellow” and people who hold his (White’s) views about how to write. But it is flaming nonsense. More...