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If there is a better losing cause than the fight against slovenly language, I am unaware of it....A man who has taken it on is Robert Hartwell Fiske, who runs an online monthly journal called the Vocabula Review (www.vocabula.com), which, as Mr. Fiske writes, "battles nonstandard, careless English and embraces clear, expressive English," and hopes to encourage its readers to do likewise. Vocabula means "words" in Latin, and words are the name of Mr. Fiske's game. Read the Vocabula Review, and you will be convinced that the battle ought to be yours, too. Mr. Fiske is the latest--and let us...

Mike Greiner teaches grammar to high school sophomores in half-hour lessons, inserted between Shakespeare and Italian sonnets. He is an old-school grammarian, one of a defiant few in the Washington region who believes in spending large blocks of class time teaching how sentences are built. For this he has earned the alliterative nickname "Grammar Greiner," along with a reputation as one of the tougher draws in the Westfield High School English department. Or, as one student opined in a sonnet he wrote, "Mr. Greiner, I think you're torturing us." Greiner, 43, teaches future Advanced Placement students at the Chantilly, Va.,...

SCOTUS has weighed in on a very controversial topic, though since it was not the issue of the case, the ruling cannot be said to be definitive. In both written and spoken English (both British and American usage) there is a growing tendency to omit the "s" after the apostrophe in the genitive form of singular nouns ending in "s". Traditionally this was the practice only in the plural, thus it would be "New Yorkers' preferences are generally for the Democrats" but "Kansas's voting record leans towards the Republicans". One of the largest parks in central London is St James's...

When are Liberals going to get it? The result of the past several elections show that the country is very nearly split 50-50 and yet liberal movie stars and musicians go out and bash Republicans. Why deliberately poke the eye of 50% of your potential market - Econ 101 anyone? As a result movie revenues are down, concert tickets aren't selling (Dixie Chicks) major contracts are not being renewed. The same with news outlets. The NY Time, LA Times, WAPO, etc. are all reporting declining revenue and profits. Gee, is there any link to the fact that they go out...

College administrators are scratching their heads trying to figure our how the straight-A students they accepted tanked on the SATs. “The University of California system, for instance, reported a 15-point drop in applicants’ scores but no corresponding dips in other measures of their quality, such as class rank and grade-point average,” Eric Hoover reports in the September 8th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “At La Salle University in Philadelphia, SAT scores fell an average of 15 points for applicants and about 10 points for admitted students even though officials had not altered their admissions strategies.” “Robert G. Voss,...

As readers of this space know, we frequently subject academics to what we view as constructive criticism. As travelers through the blogosphere may have noticed, they sometimes answer those critiques. “Someone named Candace de Russy (on the usually unbearably dreadful National Review blog on the university situation 'Phi Beta Cons') cites someone else named Laura Ventura at Accuracy in Academia to the effect that the fact that the journal Critical Inquiry has more citations of Derrida and Marx than of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Jefferson is an indication of the journal’s ‘anti-American, anti-war, and anti-Christian’ stance,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander...

The academic left has painted itself into a peculiar corner. They urge the rejection of traditional grammar as chauvinistic, or, more frequently, “hegemonic.” Unfortunately for them, they eventually have to read papers by students who have previously been taught by teachers who also share this outlook. One of the seminal texts that promotes the “grammar is dead” thesis is Preparing to Teach Writing by James Williams. “Ironically, the third edition of Williams’ book Preparing to Teach Writing appeared in 2003, the same year the National Commission on Writing made public its discovery that ‘Recent analyses indicate that more than 50...

Slang, jargon, shortcuts, vernacular, jive -- whatever you want to call the stuff, we all use improper speech at times. I used "ain't'' in my column recently. But it was with distress that I read Dwyane Wade's comment about teammate Udonis Haslem's tossing of his mouthguard at a ref in Game 2 of the Bulls-Heat series. "I don't think he would do nothing like that intentionally,'' Wade said. The sentiment's fine. I mean the grammar. The double negative, harmless as it seems -- maybe used for effect, maybe not -- connected in my mind for an instant the depressing bridge...

Between them, city councillors Howard Moscoe and Glenn De Baeremaeker have more vowels in their names than most of their colleagues. But they'd like to buy one more -- the letter U -- for the city. On Monday, they will try to sweet-talk the administration committee into a policy to buy software with a built-in Canadian spell-check. "It is our attempt to keep a little bit of Canadian culture alive and well and not to be smothered by the great elephant next door called the United States," said Mr. De Baeremaeker, who represents Scarborough Centre. "With all the rocket scientists...

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Remember when a noun was defined as a person, place or thing? In a teen magazine that is becoming part of the Baltimore middle-school reading curriculum, the noun is being redefined as "stuff." That makes a verb "what stuff does." It's part of a new approach in the Baltimore school system to teaching reading and writing in middle schools. Some say the new method doesn't have much of a track record. The change is being made after a dismal performance on state standardized tests this spring. The Baltimore Sun reported Sunday that officials have spent at least...

Though copy editors and popular writers have known it for long, an experiment by a psychologist establishes the key to impressive writing - keep it plain and simple. Writers who use long words needlessly and choose complicated font styles in print are seen as less intelligent than those who employ basic vocabulary and plain text, according to new research from the Princeton University in New Jersey to be published in the next edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology. In the study titled 'Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly', Daniel Oppenheimer based his findings...

Grammar analysis reveals ancient language treeIt's not the words, it's how you use them that counts. Jennifer Wild The languages used in Papua New Guinea have few common words, making it hard to determine their origins. When it comes to working out the relationships between ancient languages, grammar is more enlightening than vocabulary, scientists say. There are some 300 language families in the world today. Researchers have long studied similarities between the words in different languages to try to work out how they are related. But the rate of change in languages means that this method really only works back...

PORTLAND, ORE. - Shortly after Katrina slammed into New Orleans, a radio announcer described the plight of residents "refugeed" to other areas. Apparently one of the lesser known effects of the storm was its impact on the noun "refugee." Then a recent article about the electoral reform commission that's been studying problems with the 2004 campaign included this sentence about voter registration: "Democratic activists also said intimidatory tactics had been used against ethnic or racial minorities ..." In his novel "1984" George Orwell depicted a police state that maintained absolute power through a variety of tactics, including the imposition of...

Missing comma sends wrong message:- NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla. | July 03, 2005 5:11:34 AM IST A minor omission in anti-drug signs at bus stops in North Miami Beach make it look like local police are supplying drugs, not crusading against drug use. What was left out was a comma or dash or some sort of grammatical separator. The signs read Say NO' to Drugs from the NMB Police D.A.R.E Officers, the Miami Herald reported. I know what the message should be, but right now it means something else, Emilio Guerra, a local resident and grammar stickler, told Mayor Raymond...

All right, boys and girls, it's been twelve years since that September morning in 1993 when your mom gave you one last hug, brushed away your tears, and told you to listen to your first grade teacher. Well, you've made it. You're graduating high school. In the next couple of months, you'll be walking down that long aisle, watching your step as you climb to the stage, taking that diploma from your principal's hand — and then, afterwards, posing for photos with weepy relatives. You're ready for college . . . Not so fast, Poindexter. Here's a pop quiz (answers...

Please post your favorite ZOT threads here....Here's mine!TOm Harikins has lied to me, and them MOds DOne ZOtted my POst! Posted on 07/20/2004 9:30:08 AM PDT by amham98 Tom Harkins lied to me he said that he would call me 2 to 3 weeks after the eliction and help me get my ssi. he has never called to help he stole a vote theffs belong in jail I have tried to get ssi and disability for the last 14 years I was not working at the time that I started for it they denied me then now whty denie me...

Representatives of the popular Times Roman font recently announced a shortage of periods and have offered substitutes -- such as inverted commas, exclamation marks, and semicolons -- until the crisis is overcome by people such as yourself, who through creative management of surplus punctuation can perhaps allay the constant demand for periods, whose heavy usage in the last ten years (not only in English but in virtually every language in the world) is creating a burden on writers everywhere, thus generating a litany of comments, among them: "What the hell am I supposed to do without my periods? How am...

This transition seems to be overused, at least to me: having said that and its variations that said, that being said, that having been said, etc. Now my problem is this. I'm not a particularly good writer and I've always had problems with transitions. Can anyone offer help to me and others on the use of transitions without falling back on the previous examples? Also, do you think I was right in referring to the aforementioned transition as being overused. And while we're at it, is transition the proper term?

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. There are some things I just do not understand, and I am at a point where I have given up on figuring out many of these puzzlers. But there are still some conundrums I am determined to solve. For the life of me I cannot understand how it is that we have reached this level in our academic careers and we still cannot speak proper English. We have all taken at least seven years of secondary English classes prior to coming to Penn State, and once we are here, we must...

I am starting a grammar thread at the behest of Xenalyte and TheMom. Post your most irritating pet peeves of grammar or usage here.