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‘Gif’, with a hard G, is perfectly correct, and it doesn’t matter what people said in 1987
Stupid because-I-say-so prescriptivism in The Atlantic and The New York Times over the word “Gif”. “The war is won, even if the battle ensues. GIF is pronounced with a soft G, and if you think otherwise, you are wrong,” sniffs The Atlantic, its nose hoisted well into the air. The NYT agrees: “A GIF, pronounced […]
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Red Pencils Ready?
For this week’s roundup of grammar, style and other editing missteps, I turn once again to the popular After Deadline Quiz. Try to identify at least one problem in each of the passages. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/red-pencils-ready-9/
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Sexist language: it’s every man for him or herself | Mind your language
The author of Winnie-the-Pooh thought ‘he or she’ should be replaced by ‘heesh’, but there’s nothing wrong with singular ‘they’ As long ago as 1911, the American writer Ambrose Bierce, in his satirical The Devil’s Dictionary, objected to Miss – “a title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the […]
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The self-righteous slang police are a real pain, innit?
Yesterday Harris Academy in Norwood banned several slang words from its halls, including “coz”, “aint”, “like”, and “you woz”. Twitter didn’t like it one bit. “The Harris Academy in Norwood has started banning words.” wrote one user “F–––– them obviously”. “The f–––wits at Harris Academy that go around banning words have more in common with […]
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Conference: Literacy across the curriculum in different languages and contexts
Madrid, 17-19 October 2013 Access to the conference webpage
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More Ugly Disagreements
It’s been barely a month since my last litany of subject-verb agreement errors, but the file is overflowing once again. The topic is tedious, the errors exasperating. Readers notice and find it hard to understand why we make so many rather rudimentary mistakes. A good question. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/more-ugly-disagreements/