The Lyceum - Why German Sounds Funny
An excellent explanation.

The Boston Globe - Chillax
Erin McKean on "I know it's not a real world" apologia. This was the inspiration for a rant of mine earlier this month.

NYT - From A to Zyxt
A review of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. (Shea has also been blogging over at OUPblog for a while now.)

Word Wise - Comma Mia, Here I Go Again; My My, How Can I Resist You?
Some good advice for anyone who overuses commas.

Futility Closet - Mind Games
A list of names for interesting states of mind (like déjà vu).

Labels: links

I've been really busy at work lately, so I'll be the first to admit that I didn't pay much attention to Internet language stuff this month. That said, here are two links you might enjoy:

Wikipedia - Walla
"In American radio, film, and television, walla is a sound effect imitating the murmur of a crowd in the background." There's a nice mention of the use of "rabble rabble rabble" on South Park.

Regret the Error - Paper misspells its name on front page
Amazing. This is my nominee for Typo of the Year.

Labels: links

And here's my favorite language-related stuff for June:

Verbivore's Feast: A Banquet of Word & Phrase Origins - Ecdysiast
The origin of ecydsiast, H.L. Mencken's hifalutin alternative to stripper.

Business Writing - Show Me the Manual!
An authority on business writing dismisses unsourced prescriptivism.

(There were some other good anti-prescriptivist posts this month: Bradshaw of the Future called a snob a snob, and at Off the Wall, Bruce Byfield described some typical reactions to his descriptivism. See if you can spot any of those in the comments on that BotF post.)

World Wide Words - Brownie points
Another interesting word history. I like the idea that its tangled etymology helped promulgate this expression.

Nobody's Business - Language Matters
From one of the libertarian blogs I follow comes a usage quibble I haven't encountered before: threat vs. risk. Non-libertarians might not care.

Cryptomundo - The Short History of Blobsquatch
So awesome. Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo traces the origin of blobsquatch, perhaps the best word I've learned this year. Blogsquatching, mentioned in this same post, is a close second.

Labels: links

Here's my favorite language-related stuff for May:

You Don't Say - Splittists
Some excellent thoughts on the "baseless prohibition against the split infinitive."

OUPblog - The Eternal Fascination of OK
A post on the origin of OK that comes down definitively in support of my favorite theory.

Wishydig - Have red pen. Will travel. (part I)
Apropos of this Typo Eradication Advancement League post, a defense of the "fronted appositive."

Language Hat - PSEUDO-WORD FEAST.
Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) has already proven that descriptivists make the best prescriptivists — but in case there was any doubt, check out this amusing "public keelhauling" of a sentence from the New Yorker.

Financial Times - One language fits all
In this review of The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, and the inexplicably subtitle-less English Next [PDF], Henry Hitchings considers the future of English.

Labels: links

For those of you new to Notes from the Copy Editor, the sidebar has a little blog-within-a-blog of language stuff I've del.icio.us-ed. Every month or so, I highlight my very favorite links. The good stuff.

So here's my favorite language-related stuff for April:

The Onion - Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere
More punctuation humor from the people who brought you "Copy Editor's Revenge Takes Form Of Unhyphenated Word."

Motivated Grammar - Preposterous Apostrophes VII: Why Won't Willn't Work?
Because we've all been wondering: here's why we abbreviate will not as won't.

H&FJ - Pilcrow & Capitulum
Typographer Jonathan Hoefler explains the origin of the paragraph mark and the choices you can make while designing it. He followed up this post with a similar introduction to the ampersand. via wordworker.

Wikipedia - Mopery
I thought this was just a synonym of the gerund moping, but Wikipedia introduced me to two interesting alternative definitions: "walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose" and "exposing oneself to a statue or blind person."

Language Log - Angry linguistic mobs with torches
Mark Liberman makes excellent use of Language Log's new "Prescriptivist Poppycock" tag.

Wisconsin Englishes Podcast
A defunct podcast covering the various Wisconsin dialects. If you've ever been to Wisconsin, then you'll find the first three or four episodes especially interesting. The first episode ("Yah Hey!") has a great song about the Fox River Valley at the 11:40 mark. I just discovered this, but Mr. Verb was blogging about it years ago.

Stereotypist - The Signifier vs. The Signified
A one-off custom comic for philosophy of language geeks, drawn by the creator of Pictures for Sad Children.

Labels: links

Here's my favorite language-related stuff this month:

OUPblog - Absurd Entries in the OED: An Introduction To Ammon Shea
The author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages discusses some of his more amusing finds.

Ten Speed Press Cookbook Style Sheet
Surprisingly interesting. I found this during a Cheddar vs. cheddar geek-out prompted by this Editrix post.

In Search Of - National Clarity Day
Apropos of National Grammar Day, a useful reminder that clarity, not "good grammar," should be the real goal. (Which is why I'm sympathetic towards this post on the pointlessness of capitalization online.)

IHT - In Nigeria's ornate brand of English, Victorian words dance with African grammar
The headline says it all. Nigerian English is apparently awesome.

Labels: links

It's been a while, I know. Here's my favorite language-related stuff from the past two (!) months:

World Wide Words - Apostrophes
An introduction to the more controversial uses of the apostrophe. Related: Western civilization has finally produced the apostrophe-grocer's apostrophe.

Watch Yer Language
The blog of the copy desk chief at the Billings Gazette. Topics so far have included AP style for baseball terms, compound modifiers and hyphens, and how to handle semantic change. I found this blog via an Editor's Desk post on the importance of blogrolls.

Futility Closet - Got That?
A poem showcasing the stacking abilities of "that." A must-read for fans of the buffalo sentence. (I'll admit to difficulty parsing the second-to-last line. Is it one short?)

You Don't Say - 'All ways are my ways'
John McIntyre advises copy editors to exercise some principled restraint.

Regret the Error - Stumped by modern usage?
Reader gets huffy about racist legacy of stump speech, Reuters editor replies with some much-deserved sassback.

Ghost Auteur - How to Properly Use the Semicolon
This blog only has four posts so far, but do I like being able to link to a comprehensive explanation of the semicolon that isn't on an ugly-ugly page? Yes, yes I do.

The Boston Globe - What's wrong with this question?
"When you declare a word unnecessary, its very existence refutes you." The article is old, but I like that sentiment. And Mr. Verb informs me that this is the first instance of the word peeve-ology.

Labels: links

There've been an unusual amount of real estate marketing materials to proofread lately — my job for the past few weeks has essentially been removing anything that references the ADS Word of the Year — and so I haven't gotten around to making one of these linky lists.

Until now! Here's some especially good stuff from this past month:

Bremer Sprachblog - Netzplauderei
Over at the German-language Bremer Sprachblog, Herr Stefanowitsch criticizes a proposal by the Anglicism Hunters to replace chatten with netzplaudern. His shocking premise? Speakers are, by and large, not dumb.

Calvin and Hobbes - I like to verb words
The famous comic from back in the day. (Note that Calvin's final quote is three words, not four.)

The Lexicographer's Rules - The Real History and Origin of Woot and w00t
Your definitive guide to the M-W Word of the Year. For the definitive dissent to the M-W selection, head over to Errata.

The Guardian - From albedo to zugunruhe
A nice personal essay on one reader's decision to look up unfamiliar words. (Though it continues to bother me that sesquipedality is discussed here as if it had the adjective sense of sesquipedalian. It's a noun.)

Linguism - Dictionary Writers
Over at Linguism, some amusing definitions from actual dictionaries.

Twitter - emckean
Lexicographer Erin McKean's "word of the day" Twitter page. The words tend towards the wonderfully obscure.

Austro-Athenian Empire - Stating the Obvious
This blog usually covers political issues, but this guest post by Jennifer McKitrick argues (quite convincingly) that we've been overusing the word obviously.

Labels: links

It's been more than a month, but that's mostly intentional this time. Here's some especially good stuff I've found since the last installment. I could call this the November edition if I hadn't procrastinated.

Headsup - Journalism, science, grammar
Back in October, Words at Work linked to a terrible NYT squib on a supposed new generation of "gotcha" grammarians. Many of us were probably annoyed by this article, but only Headsup took the effort to step up with a takedown. Bonus: He also coined the term "ham, and eggs" comma.

lowercase L
Niche language peeveblogs are the best sort. (In fact, the more generalized "grammar" peeveblogs are usually unbearable.) I thought that this one had an amusing focus.

NYT Magazine - What's in a Name?
When gendered first names cross genders. Mentions a few girl's names that I'd never have thought were once boy's names.

World Wide Words - Boondoggle
The origin on the term boondoggle. Interesting stuff, and it touches on a pet peeve of mine: phony etymologies in journalism.

You Don't Say - Red alert!
John McIntyre's preemptive strike against bad Christmas copy. Worth reading if you're going to be editing anything Christmas-related.

Words to the Wise - More Milwaukee-ese: The bubbler
As someone who went to school in Wisconsin, I found this post on the local word for drinking fountain particularly interesting. Words to the Wise has the blogosphere's Milwaukee-ese market cornered.

Amazing Coincidences in Linguistics
I found this via Wordworker: a list of unconnected but very similar words for the same concept, in different languages.

Bradshaw of the Future - Punch and Finger
Apparently this blog is all re-runs now — oh, and I'm not "with-it" — but this post on the etymological connection between punch (originally made with five ingredients: spirit, water, lemon, sugar, and spice) and finger will make good cocktail chatter fodder.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
A Reuters blog featuring responses to proposed reader corrections, with a format other copy desk blogs would do well to emulate. via The Editor's Desk.

Neatorama - Origins of Common Abbreviations
The origins of V.I.P., Mrs., K, Rx, B.O., D-Day, XXX, and the British £.

Labels: links

This is a special "holy crap it's been a month edition," so instead of the usual three or four good links, I've got a whole pile.

Arrant Pedantry - Arrant Pedantry
In this eponymous post over at Arrant Pedantry, an editor and would-be linguist offers up a good take on the grammar nazi problem.

Basic Instructions - How to Correct Someone
I love this comic in general, but this strip struck a chord with me. All the proofreaders here at the office have it up in their cubes now.

Ben and Alice - Esperanto memo: Race not to swift
Ben and Alice is yet more proof that good blogging need not come at the expense of good writing. In this post, Ben touches on both artificial languages and alternate keyboard configurations.

Futility Closet - Simple Enough
A marvellous example of spelling ingenuity: "the following bill was sent to a gentleman..."

Language Log - X, call your office
Zimmer traces the "X, call your office" snowclone back to its (interesting!) origin.

MTA - Crying Foul Wolf with the HTML Strikethrough Element
This post at Mother Tongue Annoyances has an interesting flavor of prescriptivism to it. However, I'm inclined to agree with Tim's argument that the strikethrough element has been abused in too many fake corrections.

Motivated Grammar
This blog won me over instantly: the subtitle is "Prescriptivism Must Die!" and there's a whole series of posts on how to use the apostrophe! It's also far more articulate on these subjects than I am. via Bradshaw of the Future.

New York Post - I'm Just Saying
A convincing diatribe against the argumentative use of just, as in "you just don't understand."

Online Etymology Dictionary
Essential: this is the first place I go to check an etymology. Yes, even before I go to Bartleby.

Wikipedia - E-Prime
E-Prime is a modified form of English that lacks all forms of the verb be. In E-Prime, passive voice and it's/its confusion are impossible. It's prescriptivism on a trapeze!

Labels: links

I enjoyed Geoffrey's Nunberg's "Obscenity Rap," a look at the historical movement away from profanity and towards obscenity, so I was pleased to see that he has a number of other articles online. I spent most of this morning reading through a draft of the chapter on punctuation that he helped write for the 2002 Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Anyone who knows me shouldn't be too surprised to learn that it was the chapter's invention/use of a precise technical vocabulary to describe punctuation concepts that intrigued me the most. Below: some highlights.

Here's an early, crucial distinction between segmental and non-segmental punctuation.

The punctuation marks are all segmental units of writing — i.e. they fully occupy a position in the linear sequence of written symbols. There are, however, various non-segmental features which can serve the same kind of purpose as the punctuation marks. For example, titles of literary or other works may be italicised as an alternative to being enclosed in quotation marks.

Note that the Cambridge Grammar classes accents and umlauts as spelling, not punctuation — I don't have my own copy (yet), so I'm curious to see how they classify the New Yorker's use of diereses. That looks like non-segmental punctuation to me.

Before they get into the nitty-gritty of punctuation, the authors make a distinction between signifier and signified that would make Saussure proud:

In virtually all written material the apostrophe is physically — or, as we shall say, graphically — identical with a single quotation mark. We need, therefore, to distinguish between two kinds of concept which we will call indicators and characters. The characters are the graphical shapes, or symbols, that realise the indicators. Apostrophe and single quotation mark are then distinct indicators that may be realised by the same character.

In terms of specific punctuation, I enjoyed the lengthy discussion of How Commas Work, but it's much too long to quote here in any meaningful way.

However, there's a great part about the three types of hyphen.

At the first level we can distinguish three uses of the (ordinary) hyphen:

i. To join grammatical components in complex words: the hard hyphen

ii. To mark a break within a word at the end of a line: the soft hyphen

iii. To represent in direct speech either stuttering ('When c-c-can I come?') or exaggeratedly slow and careful pronunciation ('Speak c-l-e-a-r-l-y!')

The terms 'hard' and 'soft' are taken from word-processing: a hard hyphen is introduced into a document by a keystroke, while a soft one is inserted by the word-processing program.

Why — why? — did they not name that third hyphen type? The English geekery gods can be so cruel.

There's also a section on the en dash, which they call the long hyphen. I keep promising myself that I'll start using this consistently, but it's clearly the forgotten punctuation mark:

This is used instead of an ordinary syntactic hyphen with adjuncts consisting of nouns or proper names where the semantic relation is "between X and Y" or "from X to Y":

[...]

It can be used with more than two components, as in the London–Paris–Bonn axis. It is also found with adjectives derived from proper names: French–German relations. There is potentially a semantic contrast between the two hyphens, as in the Llewelyn–Jones Company (a partnership) vs the Llewelyn-Jones Company (with a single compound proper name). This hyphen is also used in giving spans of page numbers, dates or the like: pages 23–64, Franz Schubert (1797–1828).

Finally, there's a brief hat-tip to the separation apostrophe. This indicator category presumably includes the common-but-nonstandard greengrocer's apostrophe, but their examples mention only the form I've taken to calling the special-assignment plural apostrophe-S, the style choice that launched a thousand incorrections:

iii. separation: A's PhD's if's 1960's

A minor use of the apostrophe is to separate the plural suffix from the base, as in [7iii]; this occurs when the base consists of a letter (She got three A's in philosophy), certain kinds of abbreviation, a word used metalinguistically, or a numeral.

This book would probably be the perfect accompaniment to the $13 Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (also on my Amazon wish list) if it weren't so definitively out of my price range.

Labels: links, punctuation, vocab

As you've probably noticed, the del.icio.us blog in the sidebar has prettymuch replaced my regular "Good Stuff" feature. But since so many people found it useful, I might keep x-posting "Good Stuff" on the main blog anyways. Or just go back to my usual system of one-offs disguised as fake "regular" features.

Here's some of the best stuff I've read recently:

'It is I,' said the fullback
A bold argument against the longstanding practice of "fixing" quotes in reportage. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised to see Bill Walsh of Blogslot fame saying this — but he's absolutely right.

A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia
I have lost hours and hours to this site. Probably the definitive word trivia webpage.

The grammar of the Maple Leafs
As Bradshaw of the Future explains, there's a simple rule for pluralizing exocentric compounds (e.g. still life): just add an s.

Labels: links

Over at Bremer Sprachblog, there's an excellent post on Denglish that's also relevant here. My German is pretty rusty, but here's my attempt at a translation:


In the online edition of the St. Galler Tageblatt, there's a very nice interview with the Swiss writer and literature professor Urs Widmer. Here's an excerpt:

The language we use is full of Anglicisms. How far are you willing to accommodate Denglish?

Widmer: You know, my relationship to the language isn't a moralizing one. The language does what it does. And I watch what it does, and deploy that sometimes directly and straightforwardly, and sometimes with critical irony. But the language is always right. I'm against language wars, against complaints that too many English words are being used, too few French words, that we need to protect our dialect. I'm one of those people who floats upon the language like a cork, with a clear head.

I'm personally more suited to ranting, not profound observation, so I'm naturally pleased by Widmer's clear head (definitely read the whole interview!).

Labels: German, grammar politics, links

Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colon
Found via Language Hat: one writer's prescriptivism horror story. This one is about style differences, not imagined grammatical errors, but it still angries up the blood.

NYT Magazine - The Road to Clarity
A lengthy article on the birth of Clearview, the new highway sign font, along with some thoughts on fonts generally.

stationary vs. stationery
Fight homonym confusion! I found two of these yesterday, and after double-checking at Bartleby, I wrote back to the writer in question with the advice that "stationAry is the Adjective."

Labels: links

Language Log - Pails and flounders
I'm calling it now: Language Log post of the year. What editor could resist a taxonomy of errors with four new category labels? Also, Zwicky deserves kudos for attempting to halt the semantic (over)generalization of eggcorn. It turns out that old-fashioned malapropisms can still exist after all.

Wordorigins.org - card sharp / card shark
I've wondered which came first myself. This entry settles the great debate, with some surprising etymological history to boot.

Tenser, said the Tensor
I just rediscovered this blog. It's not always down my alley, but the combination of sci-fi and linguistics makes for some good posts.

Labels: links

NYT Magazine - On Language: Corpus
Don't skip On Language this week, Safire isn't writing it. Instead it's Erin McKean on the fascinating insights we get from analyzing the corpus.

The American Language - Simplified Spelling
H.L. Mencken on American spelling reform movements.

Word Spy - genericide
"The process by which a brand name becomes a generic name for an entire product category."

Nym Words
A useful but very ugly page.

Labels: links

OUPblog - Monthly Gleanings
Etymological notes on lollygag, teetotal, hijack, freaking, mealy-mouthed, and windfall.

Harry S? Truman
A copy-editing controversy: if the S doesn't stand for anything, is it Harry S Truman or Harry S. Truman?

NOT "e.e. cummings"
Less important for copy editors, but important for English majors everywhere: the case for E.E. Cummings.

Labels: links

Comic Sans
Language Log took note of this too. Head over to Achewood to see this fantasy sequence for orthography nerds.

Futility Closet - Language
I've been reading a lot of Futility Closet lately — it's one of those sites devoted to miscellania. The entries under the "language" topic, particularly the "In a Word" feature, are especially interesting.

Dictionary of Phrase & Fable - Canard
This is probably the most entertaining folk etymology I've ever read. Ducks!

Labels: links

It Figures - Figures of Speech
A neat blog illustrating rhetorical devices with modern pop culture examples. It's a much hipper alternative to the list that I've been using.

The Book of Lists - 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names
The rustle of silk, the symbols that comics use to indicate swearing, the space between the thumb and extended forefinger... I looked up a bunch of these words and they seem to check out.

Language Log - Totally phat
In high school the acronymnic folk etymology of phat was, as Fry would say, a "widely-believed fact" — Zwicky debunks that etymology here.

Language Miniatures
Little mini-essays on language topics. I have to admit that I haven't read much of this yet, but it certainly looks interesting.

Labels: links

Nothing brightens up a cubicle like a few language-related comics, though not all of these were safe enough for my particular workplace.

Mr. Period Returns
One of my favorite Penny Arcade comics featuring the indomitable Mr. Period, introduced here. Unfortunately, it's clearly not appropriate for the workplace.

Stop saying "bitches"
Oh, Dinosaur Comics. This prescriptivist rant ends with a funny — and intriguing! — final panel.

A Lot
At Overcompensating, Jeffrey discovers his purpose in life: defending us from that most hated of runtogethers.

Cat and Girl meet the Old Gods
Meanwhile at Cat and Girl, the enemy is the cliche.

Labels: links

Derek's ALIA Blog - Words
This blog — which is about libraries or something — has one of the best "Word of the Day" feature I've ever seen. Derek has a knack for finding interesting, novel words — collaboratorium, traditionalesque, runtogether — that illustrate useful concepts. And thanks to the magic of labels, I can make it look like that's all he ever writes about. Oh, and here's an RSS feed for the Words-only version.

Behipstered
I'm not as big of fan of Wordlustitude, which is best read like The Onion, but occasionally it pays off: this word is so useful that I suspect I've used it already.

The Chocolate Interrobang
This language blog has an interesting Algonquin-style approach. Language Hat linked to it the other day — while he noted (correctly) that there's "a fair amount of tedious pop-grammatical blather," he also espied some nuggets of goodness. I'm predictably fond of anti-prescriptivism posts like "The leftover Latin curse" and "To blithely split infinitives: a group collaboration in Draft form..." Split supines!

Paint self out of corner
At headsup: the blog, there's some useful, simple advice for writing headlines: put the subject noun up front. This is one of the central tenets of the reader-focused writing I learned in grad school.

Labels: links

A new thing, because long posts take time. This might become a regular feature, unlike all my other, pretend regular features.

Threeers
Language Log appreciates the beauty of the beauty of a same-vowel trifecta.

Harry Potter and the Grammar Police
Literal Minded defends J.K. Rowling's "weakness for adverbs" against people who don't know what adverbs are.

(Note the delicious snowclone Rowling has created with her book titles. I'm reminded of the Futurama gag about Al Gore's newest book, Harry Potter and the Balance of Earth.)

Book Review: "The Ethics of the Story"
The Editor's Desk has piqued my interest in this book, about the decisions honest reporters, copy editors and assignment editors make while crafting a story.

When Socialites Write Books
I was amused by the lede to this scathing review, in which The Hater focuses her disregard on manny, and similar words that "can actually produce an adverse physical reaction in people."

Labels: links