By William Germano. It’s difficult to read any standard definition of the word trump and not feel that the lexicographers had an eye on the contemporary political moment.
The word may have never been on our lips as often as in the past year. The Google Ngram Viewer demonstrates an enthusiasm for the word trump as peaking in the 1890s, back in America’s Gilded Age, after which it went into decline until the beginning of this century. More...
By Ben Yagoda. These quotations, in their various ways, get to a deceptively simple truth about good writing. That is, it should be similar to speech, but … The “but” is expressed by Sterne in “properly managed,” by Steffens in “would,” by Wilder in “the impression,” by Maugham in “should” and “well-bred.” Everyone knows that pure speech doesn’t work on the page. Transcribe any conversation (except maybe one between John Updike and Clive James) and you will see rampant halts and starts, “um”s and “uh”s, redundancies, ellipses, grammatical solecisms, and all manner of infelicities. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Proper names for colleges and universities are of three main types, syntactically. The first, which I’ll call the XU type (for simplicity I limit discussion here to names with the head noun University) has a modifier preceding the head noun, as in Harvard University. The second, the UX type, has a postnominal complement, usually a preposition phrase headed by the preposition of and almost always specifying a location, as in the University of California (UC). More...
By Allan Metcalf. Unless you were there, it’s hard to imagine how different the United States was back in, say, the 1950s.
No, I don’t mean the differences that computers, smartphones, and the Internet have made since then, though they are considerable. More...
By Jeffrey R. Young. Three years ago everyone was talking about Coursera, which had begun partnering with some of the world’s most elite colleges to offer free courses. There was overheated hype, as pundits speculated that it could be a magic bullet to bring down college costs. And there were tough questions, as people wondered what the goal was for partner colleges, and how the Silicon Valley company could make enough revenue on free courses to survive. More...
By Jeffrey R. Young. Professors, administrators, and ed-tech vendors don’t always speak the same language when it comes to talking about experimental approaches to teaching and research. Terms like “flipped classroom” and “digital humanities” get thrown around a lot these days, but different people often mean different things by them. And some people still don’t know what they mean, despite their buzzword status. More...
By Sarah Brown. Studying in the library, getting help from a tutor, even cheering at a college football game — all of those activities carry a little extra reward for low-income students at Ball State University. More...
By George Williams. Internet Explorer’s got ’em. Firefox’s got ’em. Chrome’s got ’em. Safari’s got ’em. Just about every major browser’s got ’em: extensions. Read more...By Lee Skallerup Bessette. I recently came across an article in Fast Company that reminded me that I had the Sway app sitting unused on my phone since February. Sway is Microsoft’s new presentation (and more!) app that aims to take us towards and into the post-PowerPoint future. And then I started watching the playlist of Sway tutorials. Read more...By Prof. Hacker. You’ve read ProfHacker posts about how to manage your email more effectively; the truth is, the best way to manage your email better is to get less email in the first place. Tools like Slack can help make this happen. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
