By Lee Skallerup Bessette. It’s been almost a year since my family moved, meaning that my husband now has an hour commute to and from work. He was getting tired of me texting him asking if he had left yet or where he was on his route home. He found the app Status that automated the process of letting me know (and vice versa) where he was or what he was doing. More...
By Amy Cavender. Picking the right tools for our work is important. I’ve written about some of my favorite tools in this space before, including in this post from — gulp! — five years ago. More...
By Adeline Koh. If you’re itching to brush up your digital teaching chops over the summer, the journal Hybrid Pedagogy is offering a Digital Pedagogy Lab this summer. Slated to take place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from August 10-14, 2015, the lab is a five-day practical institute that will combine discussions of digital pedagogy theory with hands-on practice. More...
By Ben Yagoda. I did a mental double take the first time I heard my wife, Gigi, say the word policeman. She gave the second and third syllables roughly equal stress and said -man with an ash sound (what was traditionally referred to as a short vowel), represented in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as /æ/. It came out the way I would say Batman or milkman. To me, the -man in policeman has a reduced stress and a schwa vowel (/ə/ in IPA), as in woman. More...
By Allan Metcalf. As warriors of the hard court advance from contest to contest in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, the names of the stages of the struggle follow a heroic poetic pattern going back beyond even the Old English age of Beowulf. This pattern is alliteration, the repetition not of the ends of words (as in rhyme) but the beginnings. More...
By William Germano. When Steve Easterbrook, the new chief executive of McDonald’s, recently announced his plans to adjust the chain’s offerings and operating assumptions, he couched his message in terms of the need to “align our food story around the consumer’s definition of quality and value.”
The locution food story is one kettle of fish, with or without tartar sauce and fries. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. A concerned Lingua Franca reader writes:
Perhaps it is just here in Gainesville, but I find that the radio reporters, especially those reporting weather, use the possessive pronoun when referring to time periods: “Your Friday will be sunny.” “It will be below freezing on your Monday night.” Is this modern usage? Does it happen in other places as well? Is it acceptable?
I’d noticed this particularly in robocalls and fund appeals from local arts charities—Support your Hartford Symphony! Support your candidate! Support your local NPR station!—almost always with the possessive pronoun emphasized. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. I have received a letter from a person I will refer to as Professor Faxman (I’ll explain the name below). After some preliminary throat-clearing compliments about The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, he comes to his main point: Alluding to my recent paper on the passive (browsable HTML version here), he asserts: “When I looked at your article on passive loathing, I found a lot of straw-man slaying.”
Scoundrel! The Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary agree on the meaning of straw man (which they cross-refer to man of straw). More...
By Charles Huckabee. New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs is investigating four for-profit colleges over how those institutions recruit students, and their dropout and loan-default rates, The New York Times reported. More...
By Charles Huckabee. Nearly 800 former research subjects and their families filed a billion-dollar lawsuit on Wednesday against the Johns Hopkins University, blaming the institution for its role in U.S.-government experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s that infected hundreds of people with sexually transmitted diseases, The Sun reported. More...
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