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  1. Word Count

     Punctuation Point: The Apostrophe, Beyond the Basics
    Wed Sep 15 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. We previously heard from Erin about basic uses of the apostrophe, and now she takes a deeper look at apostrophe usage. You, too, can become an apostrophe superhero!

  2. Word Count

     Causes of Writing Death: Trivial Purposeful Falsity
    Tue Sep 14 00:00:00 EDT 2010

    We writers about writing mostly write about "good" writing; we give our readers helpful hints on how to write well and point them to masters like Homer and Dickens to show them how it's done.

    Good writing, however, does not form the bulk of writing. Like islands lost in the vast Pacific, writing's great works rise as rare peaks above endless oceans of bad writing, books and journals in which the writing is so poor or feeble or dull or trivial or trite or pompous or false or malicious or stupid that it lives for a day and dies away.

  3. Word Count

     Why You Should Eat Your Frogs Early
    Mon Sep 13 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    I was born organized. In fact, I'm the kind of nut-bar who writes a family meal plan once a week. As a child, I longed to sort our family's books by size and color (no one would let me!). Now that I'm the mom, my spice drawer is alphabetized.

  4. Word Routes

     Torn Limn from Limn
    Fri Sep 10 00:00:00 EDT 2010

    The Baltimore Sun raised a ruckus among its readers by printing a certain four-letter word in a front-page headline on Tuesday. Here is the offending headline:

    Opposing votes limn differences in race

    Limn (pronounced like "limb") means "trace the shape of," "make a portrait of," or simply "describe." It isn't a word you see every day in newspaper headlines, and that bothered some Baltimoreans.

  5. Behind the Dictionary

     Facebook Says, "All Your Face Belong to Us"
    Thu Sep 09 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    Facebook wants to trademark the word "face." The social networker which connects more than 500 million users has already shown how we can all live together as one big happy set of FBF's by forcing other sites to drop "book" from their names, and now, in application no. 78980756 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Facebook is asserting its ownership of the word "face" as well.

  6. Blog Excerpts

     The True Story of "Jumping the Shark"
    Thu Sep 09 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    "Jumping the shark," a phrase used to describe the moment a TV series goes downhill, alludes to a notorious episode of "Happy Days." Now the writer of the episode has spoken out in the Los Angeles Times. Read the story behind the phrase here.

  7. Candlepower

     Flashcard: Me Tarzan, You Gaga
    Wed Sep 08 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    Though I accepted long ago that there's no grammar in rock and roll, it's always bothered me that the Doors' otherwise splendid "Touch Me" contains the lyric "Till the stars fall from the sky for you and I" (at the crescendo of the song, no less). Of course it should be "you and me." But I rationalized, as I like to think the hyper-literate Jim Morrison must have, that "me" does not rhyme with "sky." So what's Lady Gaga's excuse?

  8. Blog Excerpts

     "Refudiate" and other Top Words of the Summer
    Wed Sep 08 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    The folks at Merriam-Webster have been keeping track of the most looked-up words in their online dictionary this summer. At number one is Sarah Palin's refudiate, which you won't find in any dictionary (yet). Read all about it here, and read about the runners-up here.

  9. Word Count

     Selfcation: The Self-Catering Vacation
    Tue Sep 07 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    As the summer vacation season draws to a close, we hear about a new entry in the "X-cation" trend from Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland who writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First.

  10. Word Routes

     "Man Up" and Other Uplifting Imperatives
    Mon Sep 06 00:00:00 EDT 2010
    My latest On Language column for The New York Times digs into the currently popular words of instruction, "Man up!" How you interpret it has a lot to do with what exactly you think it means to be a man. As I write in the column, it can mean anything from "Don't be a sissy; toughen up" to "Do the right thing; be a mensch." But the up is just as important as the man, since it connects the expression to a family of imperatives of the "X up" variety, many having to do with accepting responsibility for one's actions.
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