By Geoffrey Pullum. In a Lingua Franca post a few weeks ago, I needed to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the different pronunciations of the English word garage. I didn’t explain much about the IPA; I took it for granted. We do with chemistry formulas using the element symbols in the periodic table, trusting that an educated public will understand CO₂ or H₂O (and maybe even NaCl or H₂SO₄). You get a certain amount of basic chemistry in high school or even earlier. However, my treating knowledge of phonetics similarly is not quite so justifiable. More...

By William Germano. I know I’m not the only one who’s noticing display text—advertising, announcements, and the like—angling for the reader’s attention by placing a period after each word. So that you have to read it slowly. And feel the importance. Of every word. Of. Every. Word.
This is, I hope, a momentary infatuation with the beleaguered full stop, which typographers and art directors are enlisting to add emphasis to anything, provided the anything is brief, and preferably composed of words not in excess of two syllables. More...

By Ben Yagoda. If the phrase “copy-editing memoir” quickens your heart, then you’re in store for a treat: Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton), by Mary Norris of The New Yorker. One of the many tasty tidbits in the book is that Norris’s title at the magazine actually isn’t copy editor, but rather “page OK’er”. More...

By Allan Metcalf. At last it’s March, a month to celebrate the arrival of spring and the anniversary of America’s greatest word. On March 23, three days after the vernal equinox, comes the 176th anniversary of the birth of that word: OK.
Among the many unusual qualities of OK is the fact that we know exactly when and where it was created, thanks to the indefatigable research of Allen Walker Read of Columbia University. It came from the pen and the newspaper of Charles Gordon Greene. On Page 2 of the Saturday, March 23, 1839, issue of the Boston Morning Post, in a complicated, humorous story about a boisterous bunch of Boston young men making a sailing trip to New York City, possibly returning via Providence, R.I., Greene wrote:
“. . . perhaps . . . he of the [Providence] Journal, and his train-band, would have the ‘contribution box,’ et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.”
In other words, OK was born as a joke, a double misspelling of the initials of all correct. It was laughable. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. They drop into our In boxes like mad, twitching flies, these contests apparently designed to make us feel either startlingly young or hopelessly old and out of it. It’s either “How many of these ancient pieces of technology did you use?” or “How well do you know 2014 Pop Culture?” I pass on most of them, but when our editor sent me The New York Times’s Language Quiz, I took the bait. More...

By Erin E. Templeton. The higher ed landscape was rocked this week with the news of the imminent closure of Sweet Briar College. Inside Higher Ed broke the news on Tuesday afternoon. In the aftermath of the announcement, many questions are being asked. The Christian Science Monitor asks, “Are Women’s Colleges Still Relevant?” (Disclosure, I teach at a women’s college, so for me the answer is a resounding YES). Bloomberg View asserts that Sweet Briar is closing “the right way.” Inside Higher ed tries to explain where the endowment will go. A crowd-funding effort to save the college is underway. Our own Chronicle  suggests “Sweet Briar’s Demise is a Cautionary Tale for Small Colleges. In a more dramatic fashion,, Bloomberg Business claims, “Small U.S. Colleges Battle Death Spiral as Enrollment Drops.” More...

By Ryan Cordell. The other day I was working on a project that required some image editing power. That’s not a typical requirement in my work, and so I didn’t have a good image editing program installed on my work computer. My first instinct was to download GIMP, a free alternative to Photoshop. More...