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butler holding silver platter
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James Harbeck

There’s No Way to Truly Split an Infinitive | Linguistics, Frankly

Tuesday June 17, 2014

You can’t split an infinitive. I don’t mean I don’t want you to. I don’t mean it’s not proper to. I mean it’s not possible to. This is for the same reason that I haven’t just broken one off three times, at the ends of the three preceding sentences. The English infinitive is one word. […]

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man walking Labrador dog
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James Harbeck

Topics, We Front Them | Linguistics, Frankly

Tuesday January 14, 2014

English is normally a subject-verb-object kind of language, but there are some interesting exceptions, especially in casual contexts. Consider examples such as the following: Poodles, we walk them. Labradors, they walk us. Chickens we have; roads, not so much. Not one of the clauses above follows standard English sentence order, and yet we understand them. […]

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A business man sits at a desk, among other business men, talking into a mic with a sheet of paper in front of him.
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Wilf Popoff

WASTED WORDS: Stalking Verbosity

Tuesday July 30, 2013

Verbosity is the technical term for Wasted Words and it reflects the ongoing motif of this blog series. Verbosity noun the fact or quality of using more words than needed; wordiness. (Oxford Online Dictionary) Not much here to make a writer proud. I admit to being verbosity-obsessed: while writing I’m terrorized by the possibility I’ll […]

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Colour portrait of Dr. Edwin Battistella, dressed in a shirt and sports jacket with arms open, likely delivering a lecture.
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Karen Virag

GETTABLE GRAMMAR: Learning to like “like”

Tuesday April 9, 2013

One often hears complaints about how some people litter their sentences with the word like—not as a noun, verb, preposition or conjunction, but as, like, an interjection. Like that. Now I know that Canadians like to blame Americans for all the world’s ills, but we can’t really lay this verbal tic at the feet of […]

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Close-up shot of a woman's hand, holding a pen, resting on an open book, suggesting that she is studying.
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Kristina Lundberg

Rising Above the Plateau: Mid-Career PD for Editors

Tuesday January 22, 2013

Every fall I struggle with the professional development plan I’m required to submit to my employer. My first decade in editing was brimming with formal and informal professional development, and my professional growth was steep. Fourteen years into my career, how can I rise above the PD plateau and continue to grow? Of course, in editing there’s […]

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Workman on a roof
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Karen Virag

GETTABLE GRAMMAR: Grammar class wars

Tuesday December 18, 2012

Gettable Grammar is a monthly series of conjectures, opinions and postulates by Karen Virag. GRAMMAR CLASS WARS Grammar. If it’s not your gramper’s wife, what the heck is it? Well, grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions of a language; it involves morphology and syntax, phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics. Still scratching […]

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