By Ben Yagoda. Anyone who reads college papers — and who pays attention to the punctuation therein — will recognize a fairly recent trend of students following a sentence-opening conjunction with a comma. As in: “But, that’s incorrect!”
I will immediately and quickly address the “gross canard” (Garner’s Modern American English) that starting a sentence with But, And, or any other conjunction is problematic. More...

By Amitava Kumar. If you are among the 128K followers on Twitter of @AcademicsSay, you have read tweets like the following:
“I have a statement followed by a two-part question.”
“Posit.”
“I often get emotional. But when I do, I call it affect.”
“Let’s unpack this a bit.”
etc.
I recognize myself — and us — in these tweets. More...

By Amitava Kumar. In a video that is available online, you can watch Judith Butler, philosopher and winner of a bad writing award, speaking to a crowd at Occupy Wall Street. It is a short speech, pointed and incantatory, and Butler is brilliant. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. This is the question I get most often when people learn I have a new novel out. I understand the context of the question. If you walk into a Barnes & Noble, or go browsing on Amazon, you will see real or virtual shelves devoted to Mystery, Romance, Thrillers, Historical, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Young Adult. My books, and the books of most writers I happen to know, don’t belong on any of them. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. My husband teases me for skipping past much of the bulk of newspaper editorials to get to the comments. He’s a social scientist, interested in government policies and the social order; I’m a fiction writer, interested in how personalities respond to rhetorical maneuvers. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. I noticed that W. Stanley Jevons’s remarkably successful little book Elementary Lessons in Logic (reprinted annually for decades after its appearance in 1870) uses language learning to illustrate two ways of acquiring or transmitting knowledge (see Lesson XXIV, “On Method, Analysis and Synthesis”). One is the method of instruction. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. I love this time of year in Edinburgh. The weather, of course, remains its usual disgraceful self: high winds with on-and-off rain the past few days. The gap between the David Hume Tower and the business school still funnels the wind into gusts that can lift small-framed people off their feet. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. It’s unsettling for a linguist to find serious doubt being expressed in a quality newspaper not just about whether one kilogram means “one kilogram” (it seems the standard kilogram, a cylinder of platinum and iridium kept under lock and key in France, may have been losing a tiny fraction of its weight), but also about whether one means “one.” Yet according to The Independent (July 15), a recent court judgment casts doubt on the latter. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Several correspondents sent me links to James Gingell’s recent Guardian article about what George Orwell would have thought about today’s human-resources professionals. Gingell sees HR professionals as evil slimeballs. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. We have seen it before, with bonobos and monkeys and parrots and dogs and cows and dolphins. Even bats. Heaven knows how many beasts of the field and birds of the air have been the subjects of irresponsible science journalism claiming that animal behavior reveals how human language originated, or (more commonly) that they use language just like humans. More...