grammar
cevans | August 6, 2010
Let's talk about the God Particle.
It strikes me that people refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle" in the same way some call the iPhone the "Jesus phone": with an almost pointed disregard for what such a prefix actually means. Considering the intensity of the culture wars, the popularity of the moniker is baffling. Is this about contextualizing the abstraction (and grandeur) of particle physics in a way "regular" people can understand? Does this represent a humanist concession to the religious? If so, can religious culture really be swayed by such a transparent ploy -- y'know, it…
edyong | December 7, 2009Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies.
By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…
ddobbs | January 20, 2009Today's inaugural oath got bumpy, and I was among many who dropped the ball got confused about whether it was Roberts or Obama who originally dropped the ball. Benjamin Zimmer explains:
Chief Justice John Roberts' administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. ... the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.
Get the rest at the Language Log.
Hat tip to Carl.
illconsidered | November 21, 2008I received this via unsolicited email and thought it important analysis to share:
Stunning Break with Last Eight Years
In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr.…
zooillogix | July 24, 2008Outside of Zooillogix, I serve as the moderator for a zookeeper listserv. 75% of my job seems to be approving or disapproving of classified ads for sugar gliders... I no longer find them cute. Not at all. But the other 25% comprises Q&A between zoo folks about dizzy tapirs, unenriched African porcupines, promiscuous honey badgers and the like.
Recently though I received an email informing me that our listserv's use of the compound word "zookeeper" in our name, as opposed to "zoo keeper," "gave us away as novices." Now I am a novice. In fact, I've never kept a zoo in my life, so "novice"…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2007tags: grammar, punctuation, online quiz
You Scored an A
You got 10/10 questions correct.
It's pretty obvious that you don't make basic grammatical errors.
If anything, you're annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs.
As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they're only human.
And it's humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.
The It's Its There Their They're Quiz
How did you score? And how did the authors of this quiz guess that basic punctuation and grammar mistakes on blogs can drive me to distraction?