Putting Place Names in their Proper Frames
Whenever I see fanciful or imaginative place names, real or fictional, my first instinct is not, “Ooh, how neat!” It’s more along the lines of,… Read More »Putting Place Names in their Proper Frames
Whenever I see fanciful or imaginative place names, real or fictional, my first instinct is not, “Ooh, how neat!” It’s more along the lines of,… Read More »Putting Place Names in their Proper Frames
Nestled among the marked (or “dispreferred”) behaviors of discourse we find a lovely little linguistic feature known as “hedging.” Hedging is the default refuge of… Read More »Hedging with Modals and Modifiers
Over the course of human history, the greatest conflicts have revolved around government and the right to rule. “In the land of the blind, the… Read More »The Uncontested Right to Rule
Prescriptive Rule: “Never use a body part as the subject of your sentence.” E.g., “Her shoulders rose in a hapless shrug.” (This structure is deemed bad, according… Read More »The Case of the Autonomous Body Parts
In the realms of fiction, the stereotypical nerd can be spotted from miles away: awkward, bookish, and almost always subpar in the physical department. They… Read More »The Code of the Nerd (and Everyone Else)
It never fails to amaze me the outrage that people can muster up about language use. An example from the recent past lies in the… Read More »Hopefully You’re Not Offended by This
The perfect pupil for a mentor/pupil relationship, if literary tradition is any indication, fits the following template: Male Well-meaning “Ordinary” looks And it doesn’t hurt… Read More »The Right Template for the Job
We find one of the longest battles in English linguistic history in that simple, problematic word “ask.” You wouldn’t think that three small letters… Read More »When Someone Has an Axe to Grind
True story: “its” as a pronoun didn’t come around until Early Modern English. Up until the late sixteenth century, the 3rd-person gender-neutral possessive pronoun… Read More »When Resistance Really Is Futile
It’s a big, complicated word, “linguistics,” stuffed with technical concepts and broad theories. If writing is your craft, though, this particular study could well be… Read More »7 Things Every Writer Should Know about Linguistics