RONALD SEARLE
THE ART and humor of Ronald Searle delighted me once again when I was moving some of my books and came upon Slightly Foxed. This wonderful book addresses one of … Continue reading
APOSTROPHES LIVE
PITY THE poor apostrophe. It is getting increasingly misused, abused and even relegated to secondary status among its punctuational brethren. Yet I also appreciate that our English language is a … Continue reading
WHEH’S THE CAH PAHKED?
A LETTER in The New York Times Book Review, January 6, 2013, reminded me of my own experience with the New England accent. What with Downeast Maine, the Northeast Kingdom … Continue reading
THE NAME’S THE THING
A RECENT news item got me looking up patronymics, matronymics and related naming around the world. Throughout all this I’ll base my examples on Dennis Doe, son of Algert and … Continue reading
ENGLISH 101
AS IS evident from time to time, I am an unabashed Anglophile. Along these lines, here are three books that constitute English 101. (Not that these are in any way … Continue reading
REWRITE? CLARIFY? STET?
ODDITIES APPEARING in print are fun to collect. Most of my collection consists of straight news items. Others are typos either corrected or left unaltered. I share the latter with … Continue reading
WRONG WORDS
AS A linguistic hobby, I’ve been collecting two kinds of misused words, one category dating back more than 200 years, the other defined as recently as the current decade. They’re … Continue reading
WORDS FROM WFB
SOME PICK a book by its cover. I’ve been known to pick them by their titles. And so it was with Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, a sentiment I’d rate … Continue reading
TRAVELERS’ CODE
IN THE early days of telegraph communication, sending a “cable” was priced by word count—and it cost a pretty penny. A ten-word message from New York City to Chicago in … Continue reading
LOL
HERE I’M thinking of LOL as in “Lots of Luck,” one of the many possible meanings for this oft-used internet alphabetical triple. One website lists seven interpretations of LOL earning … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 