Tag: language

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James Harbeck

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

June 17, 2014 by James Harbeck | Leave a Comment

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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Wilf Popoff

Wasted Words: Careless Pirates

May 27, 2014 by Wilf Popoff | 4 Comments on Wasted Words: Careless Pirates

To create a great language simply plunder other tongues of their attractive words, assimilate them and profess longstanding ownership. English proves this. Oxford has half a million distinct words. Add technical and slang and you’ve topped one million, says the Global Language Monitor. Most are swag. Unfortunately, piracy can be thoughtless. We are all accomplices, […]

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David Ritchie

Invisible Writing

May 6, 2014 by David Ritchie | 1 Comment on Invisible Writing

Thirty years ago, in his film Zelig, Woody Allen portrayed a “human chameleon” — a man who took on the personalities of people around him. A ghostwriter must be something like that: a “chameleon” who can write in the voice of any client. As a ghostwriter, you must convey your client’s message to the public. […]

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Lori Burwash

Lessons Learned From Eminem, David Ogilvy and a Sex Hotline

April 29, 2014 by Lori Burwash | 18 Comments on Lessons Learned From Eminem, David Ogilvy and a Sex Hotline

It all started respectably enough. Publishing courses at Ryerson, EAC workshops and conferences, the Banff Book Editing Workshop. I’ve had rock-solid editorial training. So what have a rap artist, an ad man and a sex hotline taught me about writing and editing? Some pretty useful things, it turns out. Eminem: Write and edit like a […]

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James Harbeck

I Only Wanted to Explain This | Linguistics, Frankly

April 15, 2014 by James Harbeck | 4 Comments on I Only Wanted to Explain This | Linguistics, Frankly

Adverbs are a problematic and much-maligned class of words. Linguists often have trouble explaining exactly why they go where they go. Some sorts of adverbs are baselessly despised (hopefully, people will eventually get over those hangups, but I’m not hopeful). Some people think adverbs should be excised from writing altogether. I’d like to cover all […]

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Victoria Neufeldt

Bold Words

February 18, 2014 by Victoria Neufeldt | Leave a Comment

One could say that bold words enter the language shouting. An example would be the word AIDS, which was coined in the early 1980s, probably by a journalist, as an initialism for the descriptive medical name of the disease: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Because the disease burst upon the world so devastatingly, the word AIDS was in the news just about […]

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James Harbeck

Topics, We Front Them | Linguistics, Frankly

January 14, 2014 by James Harbeck | 4 Comments on Topics, We Front Them | Linguistics, Frankly

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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Victoria Neufeldt

Shy Words

December 17, 2013 by Victoria Neufeldt | Leave a Comment

When I took on the commitment, a year ago, of contributing blog postings about language, I began bravely by tossing out a little ditty that came into my mind, inspired by Dr. Seuss: “New words, old words, shy words, bold words.” Well, I’ve talked about old words and new words, but shy words? What was […]

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Karen Virag

English can be so two-faced

September 17, 2013 by Karen Virag | Leave a Comment

My head literally exploded when I read it! What text, you are wondering, could have caused such a messy and bloody scene? (And if my head literally exploded, shouldn’t I be dead?) Well, the text in question was from an article in Salon magazine (August 22, 2013) decrying the Merriam-Webster (MW) Dictionary definition of the word literally to […]

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