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sarcastronaut10 декабря 2016 г.Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.
178- sarcastronaut9 декабря 2016 г.
“Whom” may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.
123 - sarcastronaut9 декабря 2016 г.
The most important verb is the verb “to be” in all its glory: am, are, is, was, were, will be, has been. Grammarians know it as the copulative verb. (Many grammarians prefer “linking verb,” but I have to say that the term “copulative verb” impressed me when I heard it for the first time, in a linguistics course during my junior year of college. It was my first inkling that English grammar could be interesting.)
113 - sarcastronaut8 декабря 2016 г.
I always forget that, in the popular imagination, the copy editor is a bit of a witch, and it surprises me when someone is afraid of me. Not long ago, a young editorial assistant getting her first tour of the New Yorker offices paused at my door to be introduced, and when she heard I was a copy editor she jumped back, as if I might poke her with a red-hot hyphen or force-feed her a pound of commas.
113 - sarcastronaut8 декабря 2016 г.
Autocorrect I could do without. It thinks I am stupid and clumsy, and while it’s true that I don’t know how to disable it and I can’t text with my thumbs like a teenager (though I am prehensile), why would I let a machine tell me what I want to say? I text someone “Good night” in German, and instead of “Gute Nacht” I send “Cute Nachos.” I type “adverbial,” and it comes out “adrenal,” which is like a knife thrust to my adverbial gland.
118 - sarcastronaut8 декабря 2016 г.
It was supplanted in 1961 by Webster’s Third, whose editors, led by Philip Gove, caused a huge ruckus in the dictionary world by including commonly used words without warning people about which ones would betray their vulgar origins.
111 - sarcastronaut8 декабря 2016 г.
"Webster's Blue-Back Speller is organized into tables of sounds and words, of graduated difficulty [...] It is tempting to view Webster’s lists as free association (“bed, fed, led, red, wed”) offering a window into his soul (“glut, shut, smut, slut”); he was a bachelor at the time (“Lady, lazy, legal, liar, likely, lining, lion, lonely”).
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