By Allan Metcalf. We want our language to be free of bias, don’t we? Surely anyone of good will would want to be polite to others rather than unintentionally insulting them. More...
16 août 2015
16 août 2015
Be a Lover
By Lucy Ferriss. Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What, then, is the opposite of hate? The answer, it seems to me, changes when we accuse the person rather than the hate or the hating. In today’s parlance, a hater is not simply someone who hates — or rather, the variety of hate has become narrower and more specific. In politics, there are Hillary haters. Tom Brady recently called an ESPN commentator a “Patriot hater.” Anyone who writes in a forum, like this one, that invites comments is advised to ignore the haters. More...
16 août 2015
Diagramming Trump
By Lucy Ferriss. According to “steveknows,” commenting on the Slate article “Help Us Diagram This Sentence by Donald Trump!” I have been punked. I don’t care. Gertrude Stein said there was nothing more exciting than diagramming sentences, and she wasn’t all that far from the truth. More...
16 août 2015
Etymology Is Not Destiny
By Geoffrey Pullum. The many recent allegations of sexual crimes against children by famous figures in entertainment and politics have led to extensive discussions in the British press concerning what they refer to as pedophilia (or paedophilia in the usual British spelling). What a strange word. The Greek element -phil- is called a combining form in English grammar: not usable alone, and neither a suffix nor a prefix, but used in building English words. More...
16 août 2015
The Gray Lady Gets Jiggy
By Ben Yagoda. August 8 was a momentous day, at least in my geeky world. That was because The New York Times decided “bullshit” was Fit To Print. Twice before in its 164-year history (in 1977 and 2007), the paper quoted someone as saying the word, and it has appeared on the paper’s website, but its first straight-up print appearance, with no quotation marks, was in this sentence from Neil Genzlinger’s articleabout Jon Stewart’s final broadcast: “He delivered a monologue on the theme of bullshit, a word he used over and over in the span of a few minutes.” More...
16 août 2015
Unspeakable Drug Names
By Geoffrey Pullum. Capecitabine (C15H22FN3O6) is an oncologically important chemotherapeutic prodrug. It has a trade name: Xeloda (pronounced zee-ló-da, I presume). And it’s just as well, because capecitabine is a train wreck of a name. The normal principles for interpreting English orthography come nowhere near determining even an approximate pronunciation. Try saying capecitabine aloud before you read on. More...
16 août 2015
Hyphenation, Carbonation, and X-Rays
By Ben Yagoda. The catcher and sage Yogi Berra was allegedly once asked if the name of the bottled chocolate beverage he endorsed was hyphenated. “No ma’am,” he is said to have replied. “It’s not even carbonated.” More...
16 août 2015
On @Tejucole and #Prompts
By Amitava Kumar. The use of the word prompt to mean incitement or cue has probably been around for 500 years or so, but its use in a narrower sense, as an instruction or directions for a writing assignment in class, is new to me. More...
16 août 2015
Team Productivity Through Slack
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. When I started my undergrad, it was the first year that our university gave out an email address to everyone; previously, it was only by request. Our residence halls had also just been updated with what then was considered “high speed” internet (which I think was fiber optic?) instead of dial-up. Read more...
16 août 2015
Managing Links with Nuzzel
By Amy Cavender. Many’s the time I’ve been known to suggest that the people I engage with on Facebook and Twitter quit posting so many interesting links, because my reading list in Pocket is getting too long. All too often, Pocket is where links that I thought looked interesting go to die. Read more...
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