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Preface ................................................................................................. x CHAPTER ONE page 1 Random monkeys & mendacious pontificating old windbags [some (mostly false) claims about language] The disappearing modal: for those who'll believe anything .................... 3 Activities centers in Paradise and Santa Cruz ....................................... 5 The self-styled grammarian: no respect ................................................. 6 The blowing of Strunk and White's rules off ......................................... 7 The Chicago Manual of Style-and grammar ..................................... 8 You say Nevada, I say Nevahda .......................................................... 10 "Too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence" ................................. 12 Vintage Effle ..................................................................................... 13 A Churchill story up with which I will no longer put .......................... 15 A misattribution no longer to be put up with [Guest post by Benjamin G. Zimmer] ......................................... 18 Churchill vs. editorial nonsense [Guest post by Benjamin G. Zimmer] ......................................... 21 "All lockers must be emptied of its contents." ....................................... 25 The coming death of whom: photo evidence ........................................ 26 Weblogs were invented by... Plato! ...................................................... 27 Edward Sapir and the "formal completeness of language" ................... 29 The pointless game of grammar Gotcha ............................................. 31 iii Contents Cullen Murphy draws the line ........................................................... 33 Sidney Goldberg on NYT grammar: zero for three.............................. 36 Phrasal prepositions in a civil tone ..................................................... 41 Clear Thinking Campaign gives "fogged spectacles" award to John Lister ........................................ 46 Irritating cliches? Get a life ................................................................ 47 Microsoft prescriptivism ...................................................................... 50 Trademark grammar ......................................................................... 52 A random monkey begins Julius Caesar .............................................. 57 Monkeys saying things again-NOT ................................................. 60 So now it's dogs that understand language (sigh) ................................ 63 Stupid fake pet communication tricks ................................................. 64 Fine writing at 40% adjective rate .................................................... 67 Those who take the adjectives from the table ....................................... 67 No word for "lazy hack parroting drivel"? .......................................... 70 Words for life, the universe, and everything ......................................... 71 A short sharp slap for Dennis Overbye ................................................ 72 Reuters: early bilingualism causes autism ............................................ 74 The rhetoric of cold reading ............................................................... 77 CHAPTER TWO page 81 The meaning of the lines [precision in language] Ray Charles, America, and the subjunctive ......................................... 83 Pickle jinx ......................................................................................... 86 High jinx .......................................................................................... 87 Why are negations so easy to fail to miss? ............................................ 89 Can Derrida be "even wrong"? .......................................................... 94 Suspicion of charges ........................................................................... 97 Reverse sarcasm? ................................................................................ 97 A Veterans Day story .......................................................................... 99 Contents iv Contents "What are you, French?" .................................................................. 102 Defining marriage ........................................................................... 102 A fine, or imprisonment... and both ................................................. 104 Too complex to avoid judgment? ....................................................... 107 Divine ambiguity ............................................................................. 108 Pete Rose and sorry statements of the third kind ................................ 111 Words and other lexical entries ......................................................... 113 Left turn only .................................................................................. 116 Only lane bike: road surface psycholinguistics ................................... 117 Redeemable in cash .......................................................................... 118 Sic sic sic ......................................................................................... 119 CHAPTER THREE page 123 Common and inevitable [language in evolution] English in deep trouble? ................................................................... 125 It is up to us how fast it changes ....................................................... 126 The politics of pronunciation ........................................................... 129 The theology of phonology ................................................................ 131 Fossilized prejudices about "however" ............................................... 133 Don't put up with usage abuse .......................................................... 135 Like is, like, not really like if you will .............................................. 138 ADS word of the year is metrosexual ................................................. 140 And the bead goes on ....................................................................... 142 Once is cool, twice is queer ............................................................... 146 The water tower was higher than they .............................................. 149 Such the surprise .............................................................................. 150 Far from the madding gerund .......................................................... 152 Public Service Announcement: Wedding vows are not wedding vowels ....................................... 155 Linking "which" in Patrick O'Brian ................................................ 158 v Hic merus est Thyonianus ................................................................ 160 Quoi ce-qu'elle a parlé about? .......................................................... 162 CHAPTER FOUR page 165 Slips of the ear [hearing, speaking, and spelling] Eggcorns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ??? .................. 167 Get your boyfriend to move it: a speech perception story ..................... 168 An / Anne /Ian ............................................................................... 169 Stress and death in Samarra ............................................................ 170 More on "Samarra" ......................................................................... 173 Do you wish to use Hmoob? .............................................................. 175 Capitalization and Mr Cummings .................................................. 176 CHAPTER FIVE page 179 Learn your grammar, Becky [some disastrously unhelpful guidance on usage] Lie or lay? Some disastrously unhelpful guidance ............................... 181 Research has been made ................................................................... 183 Dangling etiquette ........................................................................... 186 Phineas Gage gets an iron bar right through the PP.......................... 187 Without Washington's support... who?? ............................................. 188 Final periods and quotation marks: harder than you thought ............ 190 Passive voice and bias in Reuter headlines about Israelis and Palestinians .................................................. 193 Contents vi Two out of three on passives .............................................................. 197 Terror: not even a noun (says Jon Stewart) ....................................... 199 The SAT fails a grammar test .......................................................... 201 Collective nouns with singular verbs and plural pronouns ................ 207 Menand's acumen deserts him .......................................................... 214 Italics and stuff ................................................................................ 216 Content clauses are not necessarily complement clauses ...................... 217 Forensic syntax for spam detection .................................................... 219 Inexpert and expert phishing spam ................................................... 221 Learn your grammar, Becky ............................................................. 225 CHAPTER SIX page 229 Avoiding pseudo-text in cyberspace [language goes to college] Corpus fetishism ............................................................................... 231 Twenty thousand new words a year .................................................. 235 Counting new words: is there a lexicography gap? ............................. 237 Word counts without lexical facts ...................................................... 241 Zettascale linguistics ......................................................................... 242 Google psycholinguistics .................................................................... 247 Google-sampling: avoiding pseudo-text in cyberspace ........................ 248 Parsers that count ............................................................................. 253 Ontologies and arguments................................................................ 255 The plastic fetters of grammar .......................................................... 259 Mind-reading fatigue ...................................................................... 261 Gall in the family............................................................................ 263 This is not Middle Earth ................................................................. 265 Colorless green probability estimates ................................................. 268 How's your copperosity sagaciating? .................................................. 269 Twang scholar on "the constraints of journalism" ............................. 271 and uh-then what? ....................................................................... 273 Contents vii "Everything is correct" versus "nothing is relevant" ............................ 277 Discourse: branch or tangle?............................................................. 281 Discourse as turbulent flow .............................................................. 284 Trees spring eternal .......................................................................... 285 Language relationships: families, grafts, prisons ................................ 289 Critic: writer::zoologist:elephant....................................................... 292 CHAPTER SEVEN page 295 The fractal deconstruction of yankeehood [vocabulary lessons] It's yankees all the way down ........................................................... 297 Were the French the Yankees of Medieval Europe? ............................. 300 Sasha Aikhenvald on Inuit snow words: a clarification .................... 303 Mad cow words ............................................................................... 305 Same-sex Mrs. Santa: "the semantics are confusing" ......................... 308 The kaleidoscope of power ................................................................ 311 CHAPTER EIGHT page 313 The sixteen first rules of fiction [and other writing tips] Avoiding rape and adverbs ............................................................... 315 Alistair and the adjective ................................................................. 316 The awful German New Yorker Language? ...................................... 317 Those who are not authorized are not authorized .............................. 319 Contents viii The sixteen first rules of fiction ......................................................... 321 Jail copy editors for the right reasons ................................................. 322 Omit stupid grammar teaching ........................................................ 323 More timewasting garbage,another copy-editing moron .................... 325 Was it Frazier or the copy editor? ...................................................... 329 Grammar and essay grading ............................................................ 331 Cell phone poems ............................................................................. 332 The Dan Brown code ...................................................................... 334 Dan Brown still moving very briskly about ...................................... 337 Oxen, sharks, and insects: we need pictures ...................................... 340 Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence ...................................... 342 Thank God for film: Dan Brown without the writing ..................... 344
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Language and languages.