Language Corner
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February 6, 2012 05:52 PM
Addressee Unknown
Another comma goes AWOL
The Super Bowl is over, thank heavens, so all those incorrectly punctuated signs rooting for one team or another can come down.
You know the ones: They say “Go Giants” or “Go Patriots.”
In telling the Giants (or Patriots—no partisanship here) to “go,” the sign is making a direct address to the team. And in direct addresses, the person or...
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January 30, 2012 12:20 PM
Houses of Straw
Flimsy votes and arguments
Though we’re thick in the primary and caucus season, the testing of the political winds actually began months ago, with several “straw polls.” Thought to come from the farm practice of tossing a few shreds of straw into the air to test which way the wind was blowing to determine if it would be good weather for whatever chores needed...
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January 27, 2012 06:00 AM
The Jury is in
On "jury-rigged" and "jerry-built" confusion
An article about a rundown neighborhood said that “most of the buildings are jerry-rigged structures of corrugated aluminum.” Another article said that a company had “jury-rigged the aircraft with a missile in a demonstration flight.” A third said that “the whole deal is jerry-built, and far from complete.” And a fourth said that the tax system “is now a jury-built,...
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January 24, 2012 11:51 AM
Confidence Trick
Scams ‘R’ Us
In an episode of Dragnet from the late nineteen-sixties, Joe Friday is assigned to the “bunco squad,” where he and his partner, Bill Gannon, bust a woman running a “Ponzi scheme.”
We’re all too familiar with what a “Ponzi scheme” is, thanks to Bernard Madoff and his ilk. (Charles Ponzi ran a pyramid scene in 1919, forever lending them...
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January 17, 2012 12:37 PM
Intoxicating
Deriving ‘drink’
No one needs to be told that the present tense of the verb “to drink” is “drink.” But what about the past tense? Is it “yesterday I drunk two martinis” or “yesterday I drank two martinis”? If you said “drank,” reward yourself with an olive in your next martini.
But many people use “drunk” as the simple past tense. Despite...
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January 9, 2012 04:49 PM
And the Word of the Year Is…
Words that topped the lists
Lots of people and organizations have issued their “words of the year” lists. Whether some of the words they chose are “of the year” is a matter of style, not substance.
Truth be told, because each list is compiled for different reasons (and some of those are simply to garner attention), there are no greater lessons to be drawn from...
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December 19, 2011 12:22 PM
Language, Free
Blogs for grammar geeks
In Miracle on 34th Street, Kris Kringle makes lots of friends—and money for Macy’s—by sending customers elsewhere when Macy’s did not have something.
In the same spirit, this week Language Corner is sending you to lots of other language blogs and sites, in hopes you’ll like us better for it, or at least learn something.
Here are some of...
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December 12, 2011 02:40 PM
Yule Love This
Making a list of holiday expressions
A couple of years ago we discussed some of abuse that poor, misused apostrophes suffer this time of year, in expressions like “seasons’ greetings,” “’tis the season,” and “be good for goodness’ sake.”
This year, your holiday gift is a discussion of some seasonal expressions and their origins.
Let’s start with the “mas” in “Christmas.” Since that’s a...
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December 7, 2011 10:00 AM
Homegrown
The living language
To look back at the early years of the Columbia Journalism Review is to look at how we used not just words, but the concepts around them as well. Language, of course, evolves, often as a mirror of social changes. And while we would expect to use different words—and words differently—today than we did fifty years ago,...
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December 5, 2011 01:05 PM
On, Dasher!
A punctuation mark loved too much—or not enough
Many punctuation marks have different uses—think of the comma—but only a few leap off the page to a reader’s eye—as you can tell from this sentence.
That punctuation mark—a dash—known as the em-dash—not to be confused with a hyphen—is extremely useful—maybe too useful.
A dash can replace a comma to add emphasis—“She was born in Philadelphia—and a beautiful...
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November 28, 2011 02:12 PM
Friendly Fire
Insulting without meaning to
As language and society evolve, words that were once considered merely slang sometimes take on an offensive odor. In the past twenty years, for example, many municipalities have renamed localities with “squaw” in their names after the belated realization that the word, flung about casually for decades by cowboys and Indians in westerns, is actually a vulgarity.
Sports teams...
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November 21, 2011 03:44 PM
Separation Anxiety
Smoothing comparative phrases
Black Friday is coming! And this one will be as big as, if not more hyped and crowded than, Cyber Monday was last year.
Actually, this column has nothing to do with Black Friday, or with shopping. It has to do with comparative phrases. But that sounds so boring.
Comparative phrases, for the purposes of this column, relate one item...
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November 14, 2011 01:52 PM
Taking the Fifth
A dictionary, updated, adds and subtracts
The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is out, cause for celebration for some and anguish for others.
As Ben Zimmer wrote in the Boston Globe, the dictionary had its genesis in the outcry over the publication of the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, in 1961. When that dictionary came out,...
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November 7, 2011 03:45 PM
Conjunction-itis
What about ifs, ands, or buts?
Many generations of students have had certain grammar “truths” drilled into their little heads. One is the “myth” that infinitives can’t be split. But today we’re going to discuss the myth that sentences can’t start with conjunctions.
(Actually, whether teachers do indeed prohibit conjunctive beginnings seems to be almost as much a myth as the prohibition itself. But more on...
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