On Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum invites readers to send in the earliest citation of the use of periods to indicate slow, intense speech. On page 28 of Robert Harris’s novel Archangel (Hutchinson, London, 1998, hardback edition), a character who was tortured for a long time to get information out of him says with pride,…
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Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry. The problem with a “what do you think about this”, or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until…
My Intro to Literary Study students read Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves while I was away at a conference for most of last week. They really seem to enjoy this book. Early on this term, I noticed a critical mass of students who try to make their blog a place to practice writing for…
I’m not a student. I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes. I thought maybe you might know something about it. In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page. An…
The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It’s the kind of place where…
New to me… disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum. In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either “G*d”…
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So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice: So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and…
Guardian If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and…
From the introduction to a great list of common errors in English (Paul Brians). The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate…
The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word “quizzam,” which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect. That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual “Blog in Blank…
Language Log quotes a recent paper: In the spring of 2004, a number of middle and high school teachers enrolled in a graduate linguistics class for teachers noted that their students at certain city schools were using yo in place of he or she. The authors collected spontaneous occurrences of the pronoun and then designed…
It’s always hard for the kids to make the transition to “Daddy is working” when, from their perspective, it looks like I’m just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time. When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just…
News Digest: After a 2006 shake-up at Yum, an executive named Hearl rose to the top position. But now Hearl is out, replaced by someone named Eaton. Yum executive Hearl will retire Eaton to be new development chief By Alex Davis alexdavis@courier-journal.com The Courier-Journal Yum! Brands announced yesterday that the company’s chief operating and development…
I’m misquoted on your December press page. What I wrote was When students are writing about some areas of popular culture, user-authored sites such as Wikipedia and Urbandictionary, or game databases like MobyGames are actually far more useful than academic sources (which take months or even years to appear). http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink/banning-wikipedia-at-school-go/ But the quote appears as…
Yahoo | Reuters “w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary. Similar:Ben Franklin Sings about Your Rights as a PhotographerIf you’re legally present on a public st…AmusingShare a Coke with "Pepsi"AestheticsCarolyn made it to the next round of…
Well, Google didn’t say “glarbifulous” on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word. In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press’s preference for “Web log” is far less popular online than the traditional “weblog,” I did a quick Google search. 12,900,000 Google hits for…
Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he’s really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since…
Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don’t need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text)…