By Ben Yagoda. Comedy, in addition to being hard, ages faster than unpasteurized milk. No one is a greater admirer of the best comic writers and performers of the past than I, yet I experience their work only with admiration, almost never with actual laughter. More...
By Ben Yagoda. As the self-appointed watcher of commas, known to some (OK, known to myself) as The Comma Maven, I naturally was concerned when I saw the provisional title of my friend Craig Pittman’s forthcoming book about the weirdness of Florida. More...
By Ben Yagoda. The Lingua Franca bloggers Allen Metcalf and Anne Curzan have written about the American Dialect Society’s laudable selection of singular they as Word of the Year. More...
By Ben Yagoda. I’ve been in Australia for two weeks now, and all I can say is the people here must be extremely busy. Why else would they feel obliged to abbreviate so incredibly many words? I started to write down examples shortly after I arrived, and already my notebook is almost full. More...
By Ben Yagoda. Hey, if you don’t mind, listen to the first 20 seconds or so of this conversation between National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro and Gene Demby. More...
By Ben Yagoda. Thanks, Nancy Friedman. Some time ago, I read a blog post by the naming consultant about the trend of anthimeria in advertising — that is, using a word as a different part of speech than normal, as in Turner Classic Movies’ “Let’s Movie” and Nutella’s “Spread the Happy.” (Movie, a noun, is being used as a verb, and happy, an adjective, as a noun.) Friedman has collected examples for a long time, and a couple of months ago I started following her lead. More...
By Anne Curzan. In a junior-high-school grammar lesson about misplaced and dangling modifiers, I was given this memorable sentence to correct: “Clinging to the side of the aquarium, Mary saw the starfish.” Poor Mary. It is exhausting to be asked to hang onto an aquarium wall that way. More...
By Anne Curzan. It’s rare that I feel lucky to have Michigan’s weather in the winter, but this past weekend was one of those moments, as we Michiganders watched the coverage of snow piling up on the East Coast, from Asheville, N.C., up through New York City. And scattered through the coverage was advice about stocking up on foodstuffs before the storm. More...
By Anne Curzan. Sometimes a bun is just a bun, and sometimes an eggplant is more than an eggplant. It’s that time of year again! This weekend I was in Washington, D.C., where I was attending the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society. More...
By William Germano. Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweeted that it was his favorite line from the film’s trailer: ”I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”
It’s already the best-known line from Ridley Scott’s The Martian. You might have it on a T-shirt by now. More...
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