We welcome back Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review. Here she considers how "scapegoat" gets turned into "escape goat" — an error that actually has an etymological basis.  Continue reading...

Last spring the New York Times reported that more and more grammar vigilantes are showing up on Twitter to police the typos and grammar mistakes that they find on users' tweets. According to the Times, the tweet police "see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette," and some of them go so far as to write algorithms that seek out tweets gone wrong.  Continue reading...

Recently, someone asked me about joining two independent clauses to make a compound sentence. She thought such a sentence would need a comma, but she often found them missing. Today, we'll review how to join independent clauses.  Continue reading...

Recently I wrote here about trivial purposeful falsity, TPF for short, a major cause of writing death. Here’s another: narcissism.  Continue reading...

When people ask me the one thing they can do to improve their writing and I tell them to read more, I often receive shocked looks in return. Is it really that simple?

Well, no, of course it isn't. But reading -- and reading well -- can make a huge difference to your writing life. Here are seven tips to ensure you're doing it right.  Continue reading...

Some pet linguistic peeves are indulged, I find, not for reasons of clarity or grammatical soundness, but out of petty pedantry, habitual curmudgeonliness, or some kind of character disorder. On the other hand, I've been accused — affectionately, I hope — of excessive tolerance in such matters. But I have peeves of my own, one of which is the confusion over its and it's.  Continue reading...

Apple's latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages while doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, "that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish."  Continue reading...