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Short Saturday: Literature in the Vernacular

Quickly: can you name the literature from which these dozen phrases originate? Bah! Humbug! Old sport. Big Brother is watching you. The old ultra-violence. So it goes. Constant vigilance! All that...

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You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

I admit I’m sometimes out of the loop. (Or behind the curve. Or whatever.) I don’t watch television and it’s only me up here in the swanky second-floor office in the pink house with the blue door, so...

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To Meme or Not To Meme

My post about the definition of the word meme last week mostly found agreement among readers, but a few folks threw up their hands because they just don’t get it or don’t care. Trust me, it’s OK. You...

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Short Saturday: A New Language—It’s Child’s Play!

We’ve talked a lot about words and slang words, language and how it changes … These are not static things, as much as we’d like to think so. And when I read this little blurb—“Warlpiri rampaku [Light...

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Step Away From the Thesaurus and No One Gets Hurt

You know I love my thesaurus, right? I do. I have at least four of them, from various decades dating back to the ’40s (you’d be surprised how useful that is), as well as a rhyming dictionary, a slang...

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Many Teaspoonsful of Sugar Help the Medicine Go Down …

My Facebook friends and I engaged in an etymological rabbit chase the other day. I do, seriously, get a kick out of this stuff, even if I really should be working instead of hopping around my office...

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Mining the Archives for Little Gems (An Update*)

This week I have been working on stripping words out of a manuscript—one or two or three at a time—trying to bring the word count down to where the publisher would like it to be. It’s painstaking work,...

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The Language Metamorphosis

We’ve talked a lot here about how the language we use—the words, the grammar—is a constantly evolving, living, almost breathing thing. (And still, still we want to stop that process! Human nature, I...

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A Puke of Politicians: Collecting Collective Nouns

A book I’ve been working on has an interesting and lovely mention of terms of venery—which are a very special form of collective nouns—and it occured to me that it would be fun to take a look at them....

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At Play in the Fields of the Language (An Update*)

All summer I’ve been working on blog posts, while you’ve been reading updates to my archives on Thursdays. This week we’re going to talk about words and language. Probably my favorite subject. After my...

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Short Sunday: Until …

The word until can be a preposition (it took until late that evening to unload the truck, for example) or a conjunction (we kept unloading until it got dark) and for many years I believed the shortened...

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Short Saturday: Slang for the Ages

Oh, how I love slang. It’s fun, it’s inventive and interesting. Used in your fiction, it helps set a milieu or a characterization and is a source of incredible imagery. I love it as parts of speech and...

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Merry Melancholy Christmas

On Christmas Eve last year, I was alone in the house, awaiting my son’s arrival from out of town the next morning. It was a quiet—but happily anticipatory—time. When I posted a comment on Facebook— A...

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Are You a Prescriptivist or a Descriptivist?

Yes! I am! A few weeks ago I had Some Guy leave a comment on a two-and-a-half-year-old post of mine called “Pronoun Abuse.” In it* he alleged my argument made no sense, said I was “clearly mistaken,”...

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The Eyes (Don’t) Have It

Kids, we need to talk. You’ve just got to stop with the locking eyes. They locked eyes. Their eyes locked. It’s cliché, it’s overdone, it’s so stinkin’ melodramatic it makes me want to throw a fit in...

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Study This: The Sea

I was cleaning my office the other day (it gets so cluttered that eventually I just have to stop and straighten up; in this case, I needed to reclaim some space in the shelved closet and on the desk) …...

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Poetry of Place

It’s that time of year when one’s thoughts turn to Ireland, even if one isn’t married to an Irishman—so when mine sent me a link to a recitation of Louis MacNeice’s poem “Dublin,” I decided we were...

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Begging the Penultimate Question

I have some bad news for you. You’ve been using that phrase wrong. I’ve had friends and colleagues use it wrong—in writing—and I have bitten my tongue, because, as you know, I am not a corrector unless...

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Short Saturday: Grumbletonians, Unite!

Earlier this year I stumbled upon this lovely article—lovely to me because I freely acknowledge the fact that I’m a champion-level grumbler—and wanted to share it with you, not least because of the...

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Teach Your Children Well

My parents, as I’ve noted before, were verbal people who liked to talk, liked to (ahem) exercise the language. As a career pilot in the air force, my father exercised a very different language—often...

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