By Ellen Wexler. When 800 video gamers arrived at the University of Cincinnati’s basketball arena on Saturday morning, 8,000 feet of extension cords and 11,000 feet of Ethernet cables awaited them. Check-in was at 9 a.m., and they had a lot to carry: laptops, desktops, TV monitors, GameCube controllers. More...
By Allan Metcalf. Slightly more than four years and a thousand posts ago, at the behest of the editor Heidi Landecker at The Chronicle of Higher Education, this Lingua Franca blog came into being. Since that time, day after day, our motley crew has mused, elucidated, queried, uncovered, advertised, challenged, and pontificated about language, more or less as Heidi and Liz McMillen, The Chronicle’s editor, had envisioned. And you, dear readers, have responded with everything from dissertations of your own to completely irrelevant remarks, adventuring into niches we never had thought of. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Monday afternoon. The classroom projector announces: “In 2 minutes the projector will go into standby mode.” After 60 seconds, it changes to: “In 1 minutes the projector will go into standby mode.”
Was it really too hard to make that “1 minute”. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. I was at a department barbecue in California last summer, where conversation had turned to some recent school shooting, and how gun-control legislation can never be enacted because we cannot get round the Second Amendment. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. First-year undergraduate writing leaves so much to be desired that it seems silly to get stuck on two letters. But as I grade my first set of papers, I’m struck by the sudden ubiquity of –st:
What’s going on? Most language mavens see the –st forms of these works as archaic and attribute their use to formal-sounding hypercorrection. To some extent, that must be true. Some -st forms came from the adverbial genitive addition of –es in the 14th century — the same formation that gave us besides rather than beside. Some sort of confusion with the –est ending of superlatives left us with amongst, amidst, whilst — and, in fact, against, the only one that remains current in common American usage. More...
After more than a decade of visiting the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as an adjunct senior fellow, the prominent historian Niall Ferguson will leave Harvard University to work full time at Hoover next July. More...
To the Editor:
After reading “The Desire for Credentials in an Age of Anxiety” by Alain de Botton, (The Chronicle, September 14) I was discouraged by the consistent inability to see the forest for the trees. More...
To the Editor:
Readers can judge for themselves whether Michael Kazin ("New Ivy League, Same Old Elitism," September 11) is correct that our books describe "the changes that took place during the ’60s in almost entirely rosy and self-congratulatory terms" and that we are "hardly the only scholars too besotted with ‘transition’ for their own good." But readers may well wish to know about what our books actually set out to accomplish. More...
By Linda Van Ingen. We have an "active shooter" defense training class coming up, and I am just not interested. I resent how the burden of gun violence is being placed on educators. I feel like I’m being pushed into a gun culture that I want no part of. More...
By . The students flinch. The sound of the projector shutting down is a crisp little beep. The power light flashes once, and the entire class looks to me with huge pupils. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
