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Spelling (Sometimes) Counts
A tough book to spell Among the things I’m bad at are backing into parking spaces, taking a hint, and grasping what people are saying when they mouth words to me. Among the things I’m good at are...
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To Space or Not to Space
My friend Robb Forman Dew, who won the National Book Award for her first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, recently received more than 50 comments on her Facebook post: I’m weary of the sudden and...
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Apostrophe Where Is Thy Comma?
My hunch is that the case of the missing comma began with email. In an earlier post, I talked about a friend’s dilemma over email salutations, wherein the preferred casual “Hi” at the beginning is...
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A Kontest for Speling
Apparently I subscribe to Quora. I don’t know when my subscription began. Mostly, the posts are the sort of trivia I indulge in only when desperate for work avoidance. But the question, “What is the...
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The ‘Winners’
I didn’t plan to write a follow-up to my spelling-contest post, but reader response prompted too many thoughts to contain in a footnote. First, by popular vote, the winners from my lists were loose as...
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Legal and Illegal Commas
One of the commenters on “Dumb Copy Editing Survives” last week said something that worried me. My topic was the contrast between sentences of the sort seen in [1a] and [1b] (I prefix [1b] with an...
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A Really Bad Spell
There are bad spellers, and then there are really bad spellers. Most of the time when we gripe about bad spellers we mean the first kind, who are actually for the most part pretty good. It’s like the...
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An Honor and a Horror
Brooklyn Beckham, the 16-year-old son of the soccer star David Beckham and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, met Professor Stephen Hawking during a day in Cambridge recently. Brooklyn put a photo of the...
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How Ridic Are the New Scrabble Words?
If brr and brrr are already playable words in Scrabble, why not add grr? On May 21, Collins, the publisher of the Official Scrabble Wordlist, did just that. As announced on the Collins website: “Over...
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Spelling Out the Consequences
In Shakespeare’s day, one could get by with spelling variations; not any more.Image: Oli Scarff/Getty A language is a dialect with an army and navy, as the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich once supposedly...
View ArticleUnspeakable Drug Names
Capecitabine (C15H22FN3O6) is an oncologically important chemotherapeutic prodrug. It has a trade name: Xeloda (pronounced zee-ló-da, I presume). And it’s just as well, because capecitabine is a train...
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Crisis Management and Proper Usage
E.B. White I learned something frightening yesterday. Just by chance, really. I happened to discover that in the syllabus for a course on crisis management at a noted law school (a sound and...
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Theatricals
Sign from the Franklin Theatre, Franklin, Tenn. What’s the difference between a theater and a theatre? At one city’s convention and visitors bureau, it’s not an academic question. Recently a computer...
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Responding to Deafness
A colleague came to me yesterday with a question about a student paper on hearing loss. Should the student, he wanted to know, have capitalized the word deaf? Simply by writing the word as lowercase,...
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The Unsuitability of English
Utrecht, Holland— My mission in this pleasant central Holland town: giving a keynote address at the 25th anniversary conference of Sense, the Society of English-language Native Speaking Editors, in...
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The Awful Chinese Writing System
Is the Chinese writing system a sufficient reason on its own to guarantee that Mandarin will not become a global language like English? That’s what someone asked me after I discussed the prima facie...
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Plotting Punctuation
Adam Calhoun’s heat map of punctuation in Huckleberry Finn. Anyone who writes seriously pays attention to punctuation; we know that. That devilish comma in the Second Amendment has spawned countless...
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Missing the Point
The news from France is grim. Whether you adore France or have a love-hate relationship with all things French, one thing we’ve all been able to agree on is the spelling of the words hôtel and août....
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OK, Happy 177th!
Just after the vernal equinox of 1839, and just a month before the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, OK was born. America’s and the world’s greatest word came to the light of day as a humble joke...
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Order and Chaos in English Spelling
“But here’s the thing,” wrote David Shariatmadari in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. “English orthography makes no sense.” No sense? I know it is exaggeration for the sake of humor (no quibble...
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