3 Jun 2011

Hyphens are your friend

Submitted by Karl Hagen
This morning's google news served up a nice crash blossom, courtesy of the Times Daily: "Racist language bill passes" When I first saw the headline, I thought it was an editorial inveighing against some bill about language that happened to be racist, rather than a bill about racist language, which, on reading the article, I find to be the intended interpretation.
27 Mar 2011
The issue of the Oxford comma has come up several times at Language Log, with some very amusing examples of the consequences of omitting the comma before and. See this magazine cover, the October 2010 issue of Tails, isn't just missing the final comma but all the commas in the series.

It reads (linebreaks original),

EAT,
RAY,
LOVE

15 Mar 2011

Woruldhord

Submitted by Karl Hagen
For those interested in Old English or Anglo-Saxon culture, a fantastic resource has just been released: the Woruldhord Project. There is a lot of interesting stuff there, especially if you're teaching Old English. I found the Oxford English Faculty Exam papers particularly interesting. They illustrate the rigorous philological focus that once was the norm in the field but which now has been supplanted by other concerns.
Topic: 
26 Jan 2011

Is being evolved

Submitted by Karl Hagen
I was watching an old PBS documentary, Life Beyond Earth, with my son tonight when the narrator quoted the famous ending of Darwin's The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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