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Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught? (NYT 11-Sept-2013)
THE EDUCATION ISSUE Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught? One day last spring, James Wade sat cross-legged on the carpet and called his kindergarten class to order. Lanky and soft-spoken, Wade has a gentle charisma well suited to his role as a teacher of small children: steady, rather than exuberant. When a child performs a requested […]
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Ugly Disagreements
Singular goes with singular, plural with plural. Sounds easy. Yet agreement problems abound in our prose, between subjects and verbs, between nouns and pronouns. The perils are all familiar: phrases intervening between subject and verb that throw us off track; collective nouns that veer from singular to plural; tricky words like “each”; and, of course, […]
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New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin via Tumblr http://jesusromerotrillo.tumblr.com/post/60452869615
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Come hell or high water, Dick Swiveller, as it were
There’s a lovely piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum, on the strange phrase “‘Twas ever thus”. It survives in the language as an idiom, even though the grammar used in it is completely archaic. You can’t, as Pullum points out, use “ever” in affirmative clauses: we’d normally say “always” […]
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Struggles With ‘Than’
For some reason, comparative constructions with “than” or “as” give us no end of trouble. Probably the most common lapse is using “than” when “as” is called for — for example, “She raised more than three times as much money in the campaign than Mr. Smith.” But there are more arcane stumbles, as well. Look […]
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Seamus Heaney, the Nelson Mandela of Irish poetry, just wasn’t that good. Sorry
Are we allowed to speak ill of the recently dead? The general convention is No, especially when the dead are honoured artists. Indeed, we are usually expected to eulogise. But sometimes these eulogies go so far, and get so absurd, that the honest response is to say Hang on, that’s rubbish. And so it […]