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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.
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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."
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Last Sunday I wrote an On Language column for The New York Times Magazine about the editorial we, and all the sarcastic jokes that have been made about the presumptuous pronoun. "Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom," I wrote, "but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance." Since the column appeared, some of those voices of collective wisdom have risen to defend themselves.
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On Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has some interesting observations about the Twitterism "to tweet." Pullum writes, "The verb tweet is gradually developing its own syntax according to what it means and what its users regard as its combinatory possibilities." Read his post and the extended comments here.
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