Posted on March 30th, 2008 by grammarblogger
I attended the Los Angeles Dodgers-Boston Red Sox "historic" game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum last night, which you can read more about on my blog Le Food News, and the most memorable part of the evening was the ridiculous prices being charged for mediocre food and drink. Worse, people were actually paying the prices!
One walk around the place, and you can tell the Coliseum is run by a government entity. I couldn’t resist taking this photo to prove what I’m talking about.
Surely, any enterprising private owner out to actually make money and provide a pleasant experience for his or her patrons would at least try to use proper English (and maybe Spanish and Mandarin translations as well), but here we have above every Coliseum entryway the admonition "Don’t Crowd"–except they uniformly forgot the hypen.
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Posted on March 25th, 2008 by grammarblogger
In my destitute/semi-retired state, I have a lot of time for channel surfing, and at the 4 p.m. hour, the most engaging TV show is generally The O’Reilly Factor.
Today, one of the e-mails O’Reilly read (why isn’t the past tense red?) accused him of being disputatious.
Now, there’s a great word, though it generally applies to lawsuit-happy lawyers rather than to conservative talk-show hosts who dispute cant and lies on the political left.
Still, I appreciate people who know how to use the English language and its rich reservoir of words, and this e-mail writer definitely used a great word.
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Posted on March 20th, 2008 by grammarblogger
Joe Francis, Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur (now temporarily out of jail), is gloating that he has both nude and same-gender sex videos* of infamous escort and Eliot Spitzer-slayer Ashley Alexandra Dupre.
Meanwhile, the Orange County, Calif., Board of Supervisors is itself going wild by renaming everything public OC this and OC that, such as John Wayne OC Airport (which infuriated Mr. Wayne’s children).
Now, the group has conjured up some more interesting OC namings for government agencies, such as OC Infrastructure. What?
Okay, OC Infrastructure used to be The Resources and Development Management Department.
Wait, it gets more confusing. OC Infrastructure is broken down into two agencies, OC Public Works and OC Community.
It gets better. OC Infrastructure is composed of OC Planning, OC Road & Flood and OC Facilities. OC Community consists of OC Public Libraries, OC Parks, OC Community Services and OC Animal Care.
You see?
* Anyway, Ms. Dupre’s lawyer just this morning said the Girls Gone Wild segments featuring his client were filmed when she was 17. The videos have been withdrawn from circulation. Sorry, Joe.
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Posted on March 18th, 2008 by grammarblogger
It’s rare to be watching TV and hear someone correct another for his or her English usage, and it’s even rarer that I would turn on an L.A. Clippers telecast–except in sheer boredom–but that’s exactly what I did this past night.
Now, Ralph Lawler is the Clippers’ main play-by-play caller, and he has a sidekick whose name I can’t remember, but this sidekick said something to the effect that "the pass between he and so-and-so" was errant, or some such. Lawler, in his inimitable style, shot back: "Or between him and so-and-so." Sidekick was forced to respond, "That too."
Duly corrected.
Anyway, it’s nice to see a sports jock-caster know his English and correct someone on air.
Bottom line, the rule is this: When using a preposition, it must be followed by something in the objective case, which would be him and not he in this case since sidekick was using a pronoun instead of a noun. A noun, that is, someone’s name, wouldn’t change between accusative and nominative, but a pronoun would.
Back to the grammar books, sidekick, and hats off to you, Ralph Lawler!
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Posted on March 15th, 2008 by grammarblogger
Thanks to The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, whose column appears every other Friday in the Wall Street Journal, I’ve been reminded of those infamous readability scales that judge the grade-level of your writing.
Since the Flesch-Kindcaid readability formula has been built into Microsoft Word’s Tools function, one can easily check one’s "readability level" while using this ubiquitous word processor. The formula, much like all the others, counts the number of words in a sentence and then the number of syllables in each word. Shorter sentences and shorter words, syllable-wise, are easier to read.
However, as Bialik points out, short words such as adz, auk and lea are virtually unknown to most English readers, but they would score high on readability.
In other words, these formulas contain fundamental flaws that some researchers are working to fix.
One last example. Here is a nonsense passage that scores high in readability (the infamous concept that everything should be readable and understandable by a fifth grader):
"Acuity of eagles whistle truck kidney. Head for the treacle sump catch and but. What figgle faddle scratch dog and whistle?"
Get the idea? If not, read more here.
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Posted on March 13th, 2008 by grammarblogger
I think we all have a good idea of what the phrase "through thick and thin" means for us today, but almost none of us has any idea of its derivation.
I subscribe to a service called "A Phrase A Week" that examines these matters, and this week that phrase came up.
However, what I found most interesting was this earliest recorded use of the phrase by Geoffrey Chaucer in Olde English, to wit:
And whan the hors was laus, he gynneth gon
Toward the fen, ther wilde mares renne,
And forth with "wehee," thurgh thikke and thurgh thenne.
Okay, if you haven’t deciphered it, please turn the page for the translation into modern English.
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