This seems like a line from Catch-22. The driver had minor injuries and was charged with carless driving. — New Port Richey-Port Richey-Hudson News. Similar:In April, 2001 I was blogging about interactive fiction, Roget's Thesaurus, John Lennon, H… A student newspaper article about in…BooksIn a literature class, the author's words matter more than the author's life…
From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. MIT Scientist Captures…
xkcd: Na (Make It Better). Similar:Hide and Q (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 9) Riker, buffed up by Q, grants desires of the…Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…AmusingA masked, socially distant museum visit. So nice to get away from syllabuses and email for… Ford built about a half dozen of the…AestheticsReplacing Disputed Flags with Related…
The F. Scott Fitzgerald story “Head and Shoulders” features this unfamiliar phrase, spoken by a young actress who, through an unimportant plot contrivance, invades the study of a bookish progeny: “I knew a girl,” said Marcia reminiscently, “who went on the ten-twenty-thirty when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could…
I recently updated a handout I first created in 1998. A phrase like “a good policeman knows his duty” unnecessarily excludes women. While it would be excessive to read history as if every general use of “man” is sexist, today’s culture calls for alternatives. Using “police officer” instead of “policeman” is easy, but replacing every…
Filing this for the next time a student proposes a paper that uses “The Yellow Wallpaper” to “prove” something about postpartum depression. Here’s Google’s Ngram for “postpartum depression, “rest cure” and “Yellow Wallpaper” from 1870-2000. Similar:What’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own TyposA readable Wired article about why proof…CulturePrime Stage's…
The grammar/punctuation flames from not-all-that-well-informed posters at the end of this article are quite interesting for he or she who likes such things. Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging “The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers“–the errors and infelicities that cropped up most frequently in my students’ work. Since…
0 Similar:Jeff Bezos Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon ProductFor the past few months, a group inside …BooksYou know the Arsène Lupin story has a few more plot twists in store when, before Lupin act…You know the Arsène Lupin story has a fe…BooksBen Franklin Sings about Your Rights as a PhotographerIf you’re…
Hidden? Sure, but certainly not accidental. I didn’t notice it when I was a kid, but it sure jumped out at me when I watched the Schoolhouse Rock videos with my kids. And even small details are pro-girl. The nameless character who shows up in a mini-skirt and platforms in “Interjections!” is unbelievably excited not…
This entry comes from a podcast sponsored by a Lutheran ministry group. At about 11 minutes in, the presenters discuss a handout that was originally submitted by a student, but that I have continued to maintain over the years. What kind of e-mailer are you? – Is your electronic correspondence short and to the point,…
This article does a good job tying together two concepts I’ve been asking my freshman writing students to consider — showing vs. telling, and active vs. passive verbs. Active and Passive Voices are the difference between showing and telling. What are Active and Passive Voice? Active voice, when written well, draws the reader in, lets…
I trimmed out some stale examples and added these examples to my handout on showing and telling. What if your goal were to write about your favorite sport. Telling (No Details) I like many different sports, from skiing to rock-climbing, but when it comes right down to it, I would have to say that ping-pong is my favorite…
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One exhibit will be a BBC pronunciation guide from 1928, in which broadcasters are told to pronounce combat as cumbat and housewifery as huzzifry. There will be examples of the linguistic games people played, and a poem from Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, published in 1867. In it, 130 years before the arrival of…
The mind boggles… Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease. —NY Times Similar:I didn't exactly set out to achieve this goal, but it's not hard to do the minimum to keep…EducationWhy Marlon Brando’s Streetcar Co-Stars Couldn’t Stand Him Williams’ last play, The Glass Me…Cultureink: Inkle's open source scripting language for writing interactive narrativeGearing up…
I recognize that people who sell laundry detergent are more interested in selling soap than using gender-neutral language, but as a married man who does his own dang laundry, I was a little miffed by the language that presumes the winner of this marketing stunt will be female. If the team tracks a consumer to…
“We’re trying to detect a crime before it has occurred.” OK, roll the sci-fi thriller “Minority Report,” in which Tom Cruise and other “pre-crime” cops use psychic visions to arrest murderers before they kill. Or maybe “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” a George Clooney comedy inspired by real military experiments with supposedly psychic soldiers.…
From Thrilling Tales (where the future is retro). Ambushed in the Unknowable Vacuum Tube Preserved in the Ultimate Star The Women of Pohl’s Meteors The Satellite from the Equation Hovering Artifact The Poisonous Cat of Space The Comet of Gernsback’s Pool Captives of the Eldritch Behemoth Creature that Blasted Phobos Men of the Unlikely Doctor…
Facebook’s increasing breeches of user trust have even spawned a new term, “zuckering,” as in “That user-interface totally zuckered me into sharing 50 wedding photos,” inspired by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who once used private Facebook data to access email and other accounts of classmates while at Harvard. —NBC Bay Area Similar:Seton Hill's Latest Interactive…
