Author Archive
Palin(drome) goes back and forth
According to a mysterious “language monitoring service” cited by CNN, Sarah Palin , the American Republican vice presidential candidate, spoke at a tenth grade level (due to her astute use of “passive deflections”) at last week’s debate, while her Democratic counterpart Joe Biden managed only to graduate from the 8th. The analysis however championed form [...]
Save an endangered word, redefine the dictionary
I’ve always found it curious that the Americans have no centralized institution which establishes the end-all be-all of language. I mean, something along the lines of the German Rechtschreibungen, grammars that all of which incorporated a rather catastrophic spelling reform mandated by an official agreement between German-speaking countries in 1996. Or the Real Academia Española [...]
Par for the course? Ladies’ golf ditches English-only policy
I’m willing to wager that even those who’ve been speaking English their whole lives couldn’t tell you with confidence what a bogey or a mulligan is. Sports vocabulary has always constituted something of a rarefied language. I mean, words like scrimmage, sack or blitz have got to sound like Greek to the unintiated. Yet the [...]