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Men are increasingly rising in pitch at the end of their sentences
More men speaking in girls’ ‘dialect’, study shows By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News 6 December 2013 Last updated at 01:37
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Phrases Gone Astray
Modifying phrases should usually be adjacent to what they are describing. When such a phrase pops up in an unlikely part of the sentence, the effect ranges from clunkiness to confusion to unintended comedy. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/misplaced-phrases/
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Tricky Little Things
Tiny as they are, misplaced commas form an outsize blot on a sentence. In the spectrum of grammatical lapses, they seem particularly amateurish. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/too-many-commas/
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International Style
By coincidence, the timing of our stylebook revisions dovetailed with the rebranding of our global editions as The International New York Times. As part of that integration, our colleagues in Paris, London and Hong Kong have made a Herculean effort to adopt our stylebook and largely eliminate the variations and exceptions The Herald Tribune had […]
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The impossibility of being literal
It is literally impossible to be literal. I know what you’re thinking. Literal is the word we use when we mean exactly what we say, and metaphorical or figurative is what we say when we’re playing around. When we’re being figurative, we say “it was a million miles away”, meaning “I walked for hours.” When […]
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Beyond the shtetl
THE author of a new biography discusses the universal appeal of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and the impact Shalom Aleichem had on Jewish comedians in the 20th century from Prospero http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/life-and-legacy-sholem-aleichem?fsrc=rss via IFTTT