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Word Count
When Lightning Strikes, What Does Air Do?
Mon May 17 00:00:00 EDT 2010
Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here a children's book about weather leads Stan to ponder which English words best describe what happens to air when it is heated by lightning.
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Blog Excerpts
Top Seven Journalistic Cliches
Mon May 17 00:00:00 EDT 2010
Chris Pash, who works for Dow Jones Asia-Pacific, has been using the Factiva news database to track the most overused journalistic expressions. He's come up with a list of the top seven cliches, from "at the end of the day" to "concerned residents." Read all about it here.
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Word Routes
Beware of Quants with Fat Fingers
Fri May 14 00:00:00 EDT 2010
During the global economic crisis of the last few years, previously esoteric financial jargon has worked its way into public discourse. One such term is quant, a shorthand term for "quantitative analyst." They're the subject of Scott Patterson's new book, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, and I take on the term in my latest On Language column in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's a timely topic, given the mysterious 1,000-point dip in the Dow Jones index last week, variously blamed on quants and "fat fingers."
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Blog Excerpts
Strange Signs from Abroad
Fri May 14 00:00:00 EDT 2010
The New York Times recently ran an article on how the city of Shanghai is struggling to combat "Chinglish" — poorly (and often humorously) translated English signage. Accompanying the article was a slide show, " A Sampling of Chinglish." The Times then asked its readers for further "photos of amusingly translated or otherwise quirky signs," and the hilarious collection is now available here.
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Word Count
How We Know Writers Through Their Writing
Thu May 13 00:00:00 EDT 2010
Michael Lydon, a well-known writer on popular music since the 1960s, has for many years also been writing about writing. Lydon's essays, written with a colloquial clarity, shed fresh light on familiar and not so familiar aspects of the writing art. Here Lydon explores how the best writers speak to us through their singular literary styles.
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Candlepower
The Thinkers
Wed May 12 00:00:00 EDT 2010
The "call to action" is one of the sacrosanct elements of ads and direct mail: Lose weight! Save money! Act now! How unorthodox, then, to discover calls to inaction — invitations to simply think — in a spate of recent ad campaigns.
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Word Count
Do You Suffer from Writing Apnea?
Tue May 11 00:00:00 EDT 2010
A few days before I was married, almost 21 years ago, I was walking the eight blocks from our apartment to the daily newspaper at which I worked and, at a stoplight, happened to glance downward. Yikes! I was wearing two different shoes.
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Teachers at Work
Gerunds, Whiches and There's, Oh My!
Mon May 10 00:00:00 EDT 2010
Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker continues her entertaining and enlightening look at common errors in college papers and how to fix them. Here she tackles frequently appearing grammar goofs.
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Word Routes
Counting E-mails (and Spams)
Fri May 07 00:00:00 EDT 2010
With new technology comes new language, and with new language comes new confusion over usage. Here's a question that people have been puzzling over for a couple of decades now: if we don't pluralize mail as mails, why should we pluralize e-mail as e-mails?
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Candlepower
Red Pen Diaries: A Dash of Drama
Thu May 06 00:00:00 EDT 2010
When my 12-year-old nephew, Caleb, asked what I was going to write about for the next installment of Red Pen Diaries, I said: "The em dash." He confessed that he didn't know what that was. "Neither do most adults," I explained.
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