Karl Hagen's blog

4 Jan 2009

Crank prescriptivism

Submitted by Karl Hagen
Yeah, I know that some of you probably think the title to this post is redundant, but some attempts to prescribe (or proscribe) language are stranger than others. On Language Log, Arnold Zwicky writes about a whimsical proscription from Ambrose Bierce, along with someone who apparently believes that that as a complementizer can never be omitted. According to this person, "I know he is a good man" should really be "I know that he is a good man."
15 Nov 2008
Hasty generalizations about grammar quickly get you into trouble. As a case in point, consider the difference between subject-verb agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement. Both require, in the core cases, attention to the number (singular or plural) of a particular noun phrase. At the same time, there are important differences, and treating the two as identical can lead to significant problems.
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10 Oct 2008

Hot for Chronological Accuracy

Submitted by Karl Hagen
I have mixed feelings about Hotforwords. On the plus side, she's talking about language, she generally does some research, and she seems to have a clue about linguistic matters. (Oh, yeah, and she really is hot.) On the other hand, she confines herself to a fairly trivial form of etymology: stories about word origins shorn of historical linguistics. It also appears that her research is confined to looking things up in a few of the standard references (like the OED), and, more questionably, Wikipedia.

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