If someone says, “How about some music,” and you say, “Sure — Beethoven’s Fifth?” do you think they’ll be happy if you just hand them a printed copy of the score? A musical score is intended to be performed, and you don’t have a performance without musicians, a conductor, and …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a novel in want of readers must be possessed of a good opening line. A book is a relationship — many of us spend more intimate time with books than with people — and it is important to start the relationship off on …
Is writing art? And if it is, what is editing? If we say writing is “artful,” or “artistic” or “an art,” we mean that we appreciate it aesthetically and admire it for the skill it evinces. But if we say not “writing is an art” but “writing is art” — …
I asked people on Twitter about words they love irrationally much. I got quite a few responses. Actually, I got so many that when I tried to retweet them all, Twitter finally told me I had reached my daily tweet limit. And did again the next day. The words that …
There are times when you want to make your prose more lively — if not flagrantly flippant then at least glancingly gleeful. James Harbeck discusses how to do that.
People with serious health problems are often subject to novel treatments. But that shouldn’t mean being treated like they’re in a novel. Health problems are human problems, and they can be important stories about real things affecting real people. But often, in telling them, we create another problem, because we …
At the ACES conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in late March, the Associated Press announced changes to their recommendations for handling numbers and debated some others. About sixty percent of those present gasped when one of the recommendations was made — in fact, it might have been 70 percent. No, …
The voting is in, and the American Dialect Society’s Slang Word of the Year is… yeet. Yeet is not so well known to oldsters, but it is in vogue among the youth. Its popularity demonstrates a central fact of how vocabulary spreads. It also leads us to Bugs Bunny, Clark …
Or: Can You Rhyme Emoji? An eye rhyme is when two words that only look like they rhyme are used for a rhyme. This was an early annoyance from my childhood, when elementary poems rhymed good with food. Another famous one is from Shakespeare: If this be error and upon …
It was one of those crises that end up in the parentheses of memoranda; it concerned the geneses of several referenda among alumni (and alumnæ) about addenda to their indices: the criteria for the termini of Greek- and Latin-derived words. By what formulæ should we choose, for instance, schemata or …