Category Archives: language

From Windows Sounds to Song

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, elements of other recordings. Now, someone who goes by the name Clown Staples has created a song using only the very basic Sound Recorder that comes pre-installed with Windows and the collection of generic sounds that play when users perform certain actions on their Windows computers. You can watch a Flash animation of Clown playing the tune…

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How Are We Doing?

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…

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Mixed Messages

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 insults–some of which I recall hearing others use and some that I’ve just made up on my own. Here they are, in no particular order…

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Blog Named Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster just named their 2004 word of the year, based on number of online lookups. And the winner is blog…

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Verbal Energy

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 in the Christian Science Monitor, written by Ruth Walker. Now, whenever a new article from Verbal Energy is posted, its title will automatically appear in the right-hand column of my Writing Resources page…
According to the Christian Science Monitor’s web site, Verbal Energy is a “blog about words and grammar from the Monitor’s copy editor extraordinaire.” It’s fun and witty and perceptive. So visit it, bookmark it, and read it with glee.
Here is an excerpt from one of her recent articles…

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New Book by a Literary Master

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.”
Click on the link to read more…

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The Loveliest Sentence of All

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 … Continue reading 

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Favorite New Words from The Word Spy

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 … Continue reading 

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Mark These Words

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 … Continue reading 

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Popeye Doll

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 … Continue reading 

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