We'd like to welcome Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review, as our newest regular contributor! In this column, she's grabbing at "straws": straw polls, straw men, and straw bashers.
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Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin offers a "word story" on cacophony, which she finds to be "a very apt term for the digital world."
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Merrill Perlman looks at the way that the "drink/drank/drunk" verb paradigm is changing, and advises you how to derive "drunk" (but please, don't drive drunk).
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Bill Walsh, a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post and longtime usage maven, poses a mathematical question:
If I start with $100 and end up with $250, did that money grow 2 1/2 times? Continue reading..."Did You Mean...?": When Ambiguity Foils Communication
Does "semiannual" mean twice a year or every two years? And other stumpers.
In day-to-day discourse, we don't usually encounter terms that are genuinely problematic. If someone throws something at us that's clearly wrong, like calvary for cavalry, we still get it. If my dialect is "She took a cake to the party," whereas yours is "She brought a cake to the party," I'll still understand you.
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On his Sesquiotica blog, writer, editor, and designer James Harbeck has a regular feature that he calls "Word Tasting Notes." "Words are delicious and intoxicating," Harbeck writes. "So why not taste them like a fine wine?" Here, he delves into the history of a word we frequently hear (or mishear) during the holiday season: hark.
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Just in time for the holiday season, Merrill Perlman takes a look at the origins of some yuletide expressions.
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