May 8, 2008
Sara got a pair of shoes in the mail from Zappos today. On the shoebox, in big, bold lettering, were the words "100% HYBRID." Is it just me, or is that an oxymoron? Isn't it like saying that something is completely partial? (And I don't mean partial in the sense of biased.) Anyway, it struck me as kind of funny. …
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August 7, 2007
Billy Collins is one of my favorite contemporary poets. His writing is always crystal-clear, yet many-layered. A couple years ago I featured one of his poems, Man Listening to Disc, in my "Take a Stanza" series. A couple days ago I discovered (via 37signals) a little gem of a site that accompanies 11 Billy Collins poems with gorgeous animation. Today: …
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March 4, 2007
At some point in my life I had this one memorized; it felt good having it rattle around in my head. It's one of my favorites from Seamus Heaney—more tender than most of his poems, but still infused with his working-class vigor. Scaffolding Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that …
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February 20, 2007
Last year my mother gave me a desk calendar that had an obsolete English word for each day. It was geeky-cool to be greeted with an example of "Forgotten English" each day at work. Some of the words are just too fun not to be shared. Others are so useful that I think they should be re-adopted into the English …
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October 4, 2006
Here's a fun new game that I just made up this morning. Go to a book store and find the New Releases section. It should be staring you in the face as soon as you walk through the door. Now, start reading the dust-jacket blurbs and inside-flap promotional fluff of as many books as you can as fast as you …
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September 17, 2006
Every once in a while a word will gain traction in the press, and reporters, pundits, and other authoritative voices will say it over and over again until it becomes embedded in the public's consciousness. Occasionally the word that bursts to the forefront of our attention is one that I've used, or at least heard others use, in casual conversation …
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July 18, 2006
It's time once again for a little poetry. Wait! Don't run and hide! This is a good poem, and it uses simple language, and it isn't hard to "figure out." Larkin can be so curmudgeonly at times that he makes Oscar the Grouch look like Sweet Mary Sunshine, but this poem seems to hold something tender beneath its contrary exterior. …
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April 28, 2006
It would be terribly irresponsible of me not to post a little poetry before the month ends. After all, April is National Poetry Month. The presumptive poem of the month is T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, because it starts with these timely lines: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and …
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January 31, 2006
By now just about everyone reading this blog (yeah, all three or four of you) has heard about the big scandal involving best-selling author James Frey and his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. In a lengthy exposé, The Smoking Gun confirmed what others had suspected: Some events in the book were either creative embellishments or complete fictions—in other words, lies. …
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December 16, 2005
A recent check of the big list of 2005 lists at fimoculous.com revealed a number of new word lists popping up around the web. Here are a few highlights: Merriam-Webster Dictionary As you may recall, last year's winner was blog. In a telling redirection of attention, the most-looked-up word in 2005 is integrity. Others in the top 10 are contempt, …
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December 11, 2005
This little poetry feature of mine is long overdue, so here are two stanzas from a four-stanza poem by Jane Kenyon. That's right—two for the price of one: Happiness There's just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. … …
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December 7, 2005
It's time once again for the word of the year, this time brought to you by the New Oxford American Dictionary. As you may recall, last year's top word, according to Merriam-Webster, was blog. Now we have Podcast, a technology popularized by blogs. Oh, that rapidly encroaching blogosphere. The NOA Dictionary's definition of podcast is "a digital recording of a …
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September 25, 2005
A year ago a new section of my website, the English Rules Word of the Day, was born. I started it after chatting with a couple friends at work about words and bemoaning the lack of inspiration in the words generated by the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day. I can't remember if they challenged me to do my …
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August 30, 2005
I finished reading Marilynn Robinson's novel Gilead over a month ago, the same day that I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Since then I've been on a hiatus from reading fiction, though I'm not sure why. Either Harry Potter cast a spell on me or the melancholy beauty of Gilead lulled me into a contented stupor. All …
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July 1, 2005
It's time once again for the monthly stanza. This one appears at the end of a poem by W. H. Auden, one of the great 20th century poets. Some of you may remember the Auden poem that the Scottish chap read for his dead friend in Four Weddings and a Funeral. This is a different poem. Musee des Beaux Arts …
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June 6, 2005
Jose Saramago's writing is so peculiar that three weeks after I finished reading his latest novel, The Double, I'm still baffled by how he pulls it off. It wasn't just the long, sinuous sentences or the simultaneously disturbing and comical events that teeter on the brink of absurdity, but also the odd voice of the narrator, who most of the …
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May 29, 2005
May almost slipped away before I got a chance to post the month's stanza. This poem, "Spring and Fall," was written by one of my favorite poets of all time, Gerard Manley Hopkins. A couple of the lines are hard to unpack, and the syntax is a little convoluted in places, but most of the sense of it is pretty …
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May 11, 2005
In a blog entry titled What's wrong with academia, part two hundred and twenty-four, the pseudonymous B**ch PhD complains that the student evaluation is typically the only regular feedback [professors] get on any aspect of our jobs. Let me tell you, her entry, as well as many of the 110 comments, gave me the willies—because of how much I could …
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May 9, 2005
There are some words that I may not use because they are too vulgar. Others I try to avoid because they may offend someone (and I try my best never to offend). And then there are those I won't touch because I don't have the gravitas that such words require. Here is a small sample of the many words I …
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April 15, 2005
It would have been too easy to choose the first stanza of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" for this month's verse: "April is the cruellest month…" Instead, I give to you a few lines of a poem by Edward Hirsch, an American poet, professor, and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. Here is the last stanza of the last poem in his …
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April 8, 2005
Tad Friend's article, "Secret Agent Man," in a recent issue of The New Yorker, has this great quote from Michael Ovitz, former head of Disney and Hollywood agent: I always viewed myself as the quarterback of a smoothly oiled football team, the playmaker. For some reason that struck me as the funniest thing I had read in a long time. …
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April 1, 2005
In what scientists are calling the first text-to-human transmission of a virus, a Yale University student who goes by the name "Anotmas" has contracted the deadly Extended Metaphor Disease (EMD). Doctors for the afflicted student first discovered his condition after concerned friends alerted New Haven police to his plaintive cry for help in an online poetry forum: i DON'T GET …
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March 30, 2005
Lately I've been feeling bullish about leveraging innovations and making them top of mind. But I realize that going forward we'll have to step up to the plate and kick it up a notch so we don't get behind the eight ball. With just-in-time paradigm shifts, we'll empower key target markets to embrace enterprise solutions and create a win-win for …
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March 3, 2005
This idea just popped into my head, and I'm going with it. Once a month, I'm going to post a stanza from a favorite poem—just one stanza, though, because I don't want to run afoul of copyright law if the poem is a recent one. Okay, if the stanzas are really short, I might include two. And if they're really …
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February 9, 2005
Announcing the new English Rules Writing Guide! It's just a wee little project I decided to put together after looking at my site's referral log and realizing that most of the people who visit English Rules are probably going away empty handed. A lot of people are looking for help with English "grammer," so that's what I'm going to give …
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January 29, 2005
One of my favorite online references, Visual Thesaurus, has just been upgraded to version 3, which now includes audio pronunciations, spell checking, and enhanced printing. While it used to be free, it's still available for a limited number of searches before they require you to pay. Just type in a word, and the visual thesaurus will show a diagram with …
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January 24, 2005
There is a great tradition of visual artists using "found" objects to create new masterpieces, be they sculpture, collage, or mixed media. Musicians, too, have mixed a variety of elements into new compositions—bird songs, environmental noise, samples of other recordings. Now, someone who goes by the name Clown Staples has created a song using only the very basic Sound Recorder …
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January 19, 2005
One of the utterances from service personnel that I find most irritating—along with the ubiquitous "Can I help who's next?"—is the question, How are we doing? It's as if they're asking how they themselves are doing, too. How should I know how they're doing? My standard response to such effrontery is, "We're fine. How are we?" Unfortunately, that kind of …
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December 9, 2004
Jim Vanden Bosh, a former professor and colleague of mine, once told me he was tempted to write on a student's recommendation form, "I cannot recommend him too highly," just for the beautiful ambiguity of the statement. Inspired by his masterful wit, I've been trying to come up with a list of other backhanded compliments, or mixed messages, or accidental …
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December 1, 2004
Merriam-Webster just named their 2004 word of the year, based on number of online lookups. And the winner is blog. One of my favorite words, defenestration, just squeaked in at number 10, while others on the short list related to the U.S. elections or other news events this year (incumbent, electoral, insurgent). …
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October 24, 2004
While the Word Spy site is great in theory, there hasn't been a new word posted to it since I integrated the RSS feed into the englishrules.com Writing Resources page a few months ago. So, I'm stripping it from the page to make way for my new favorite grammar blog, Verbal Energy, which appears as a column written by Ruth …
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October 10, 2004
Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and winner of a Nobel Prize for literature, has just published a new book, The Double. A New York Times book review describes it as "clever, alarming and blackly funny, even though its central premise is a literary cliché. I've read three of his other books—The Cave, All the Names, and Blindness—and look forward to …
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August 29, 2004
Ben and I are reading E.B. White's Stuart Little for a second time, and enjoying it very much. I'm never quite sure how much Ben understands, or how long his attention lasts, but he usually wants to keep reading when I've closed the book and tucked him into bed, and he occasionally stops me to ask what "mercy" or "offhanded" …
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August 12, 2004
The Word Spy tries to keep track of neologisms as they start making their way into the vernacular. Here are a couple of my favorites: butt call n. An unintended phone call placed by sitting on one's cell phone. wife acceptance factor n. In an object, especially an electronic device, that normally appeals only to men, the qualities or features …
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August 7, 2004
In the Summer 2004 issue of City Journal, Michael Knox Beran wistfully describes the bygone days of classical education, when students were required to commit lines of both poetry and prose to memory. He makes an eloquent case, and I am sympathetic to his views (at least, some of them): Without knowing it, a child who has learned a scrap …
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June 6, 2004
Saturday morning I took the kids to the YMCA so they could jump around and climb on things in the kids' gym while I tried get a little exercise. While I was lumbering along on the treadmill I glanced up at the closed captioning for a report that was showing on CNN. The first thing I saw was that "Popeye …
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April 18, 2004
I just wanted to be on the record as someone who is against landmines. I know that most people think they're great, but I'm willing to stand up for what I think is right. That's why I decided to show this envelope that came in the mail a couple years ago from the Campaign to Ban Landmines: I have one …
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