By Andy Thomason. Black tape was found covering the faces of black Harvard Law School professors on framed photographs outside a lecture hall on Thursday, a day after students there held a rally in solidarity with other campuses protesting racism across the country. More...
By Andy Thomason. Roughly 15 percent of female college students are raped while incapacitated by alcohol or drugs during their freshman year, according to a new study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. More...
By Andy Thomason. Public and private colleges and universities alike expect tuition revenue to be relatively stagnant in the 2016 fiscal year, according to Moody’s Investors Service’s annual tuition survey. More...
By William Germano. Buzz Lightyear, the challenged but adorable astronaut of the Toy Story films, sets high goals for himself. To infinity — and beyond, he exclaims, as earnestly as an animated toy might hope to. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. It’s slightly surprising that The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, by Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly, still (even in the 2015 Kindle edition) turns its nose up at the phrase people of color:
people of color
Except in direct quotations, the expression is too self-conscious for the news columns. Substitute a term like minorities or, better, refer to specific ethnic groups – black and Hispanic authors, for example.
Some copy editors think the phrase has moved into the mainstream and should be welcomed. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. In my post last week I cited a few ways in which English is unsuitable as a global language, and mentioned that its being one anyway is attributable at least in part to undeserved luck.
Of course, it wasn’t all luck. British imperialism and the African slave trade laid the foundations. Even today, with the empire gone, English has about 400 million native speakers, on all seven continents, and about a billion and a half use it for some purposes. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Utrecht, Holland— My mission in this pleasant central Holland town: giving a keynote address at the 25th anniversary conference of Sense (originally the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors, now a general professional organization of anglophone editors in the Netherlands) in the palatial surroundings of the beautifully restored 16th-century Paushuize. More...
By . In academe, ideas cost money. But how much?
Advocates for open-access journals say that academic research should be free for everyone to read. But even those proponents acknowledge that publishing costs money — the disagreement is over the amount. More...
By Allan Metcalf. You would think that someone closest in time and place to the emergence of a new word would be the best authority about its origin. More...
By Allan Metcalf. Welcome to December! Yesterday was the first of the month, time for your Word of the Month: merry.
That’s right. As a member of the Word of the Month Club, you’re entitled to use this month’s word on any and every occasion. More...
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