Language
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From a comment at Rod Dreher's blog: "Throughout human history….people have gone stark raven mad or crazy." I like that. I had a post about that kind of thing not so very long ago–not craziness, I mean, but the phenomenon where someone substitutes for a word that was really part of a saying or idiom
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A few months back…no, wait, over six months back–see this post…I listened to an audio version of the Josephine Tey novel The Franchise Affair. It involves someone falsely accused of a crime, and early in the story there's an exchange between the accused and her lawyer which goes something like this: What have you done?
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I've been complaining for a long time–yeah, I know, this sentence could end right there, but I'll continue anyway–I've been complaining for a long time about the "generations" construct which is a sort of pop sociology thing that sometimes seems barely a step up from astrology. This chart, harvested from Wikipedia, sums up the system,
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If you can even call it writing…. Maybe just jargon. Or guff. I received an email on my work account with this subject: Implement Engaging Prevention Training at [college] I wondered what it meant. Training for the purpose of preventing something, apparently. Opened the email and saw a company logo with this text: Proven, Engaging
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…people would stop saying "science" when they mean "research," presumably scientific research. As in "The science shows that…"
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I know I can be pedantic, but I like to think I'm not excessively so. I deny that I'm a grammar Nazi. I understand that language is constantly shifting, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Some departures from standard grammar–I hesitate even to say "correct," so wary am I of being overly
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Back in August I had a post about the often-funny result of someone hearing a common phrase without having seen it in print or learned its actual meaning, then setting down in print what he thought he heard, which is sometimes oddly plausible. "Tow the line" as a misconstrual of "toe the line" was one
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In response to recommendations from Rob G and Janet, I recently read Julien Green's Each Man In His Darkness. Well, I guess it wasn't only in response to them. I've run across Green's name now and then over the years in discussions of modern Catholic novelists. It usually turns up toward the end, in an almost
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I'm beginning to suspect that Jean-Luc Godard is an over-rated filmmaker. Or at least that I don't care very much for his work. Maybe ten years ago I saw Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part), and really liked it. But I suspect that may have been only because of a few charming scenes involving the beautiful and
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Which would you use as the plural of "dogma" when writing in a fairly formal context? The first strikes my ear as slightly off, the second as a little pedantic and even maybe pompous to some ears. By "fairly formal context" I mean something meant for the literate general reader, less formal than the academic but more so than
Light On Dark Water 