Tag Archives: usage

Election Looming, Tories Put Posh Foot in Mouth – NYTimes.com

Last year, worried about how an impeccably pedigreed Tory candidate named Annunziata Rees-Mogg would go over with the hoi polloi, Mr. Cameron suggested that she might want to campaign under the name ‘Nancy Mogg.’ … She refused, although, to be … Continue reading

Posted in O mores, Polis, de jure uxoris | Tagged , | Leave a comment

When I use a word

Posted in Albedo, Bartlett, Observatorio, Science, Vance Parker, Words, e-Discovery, regex() | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Font terms survey results | Phinney on Fonts

There is no consensus, but the overall opinion is that in today’s world of digital typography ‘a typeface’ means the general design, including all its styles, regardless of how it’s instantiated, while ‘a font’ means a single style of a … Continue reading

Posted in Observatorio, Words | Tagged | Leave a comment

On writing

The reason was a fear of immodesty, born of the injunction that wasps shouldn’t “make a show” of themselves. It was all right for me to explain the decisions that other writers made, but not the ones I had made. … Continue reading

Posted in In re, Observatorio | Tagged | 1 Comment

That? Which? Or What? – Times Topics Blog – NYTimes.com

Which do you want? That one!

Posted in regex() | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sex and the semicolon – The Boston Globe

Debate continues There is another, invisible punctuation rule that is blissfully free of any semantic baggage: the second space after . : and ? Passionate defenders of the rule go so far as to declare it a rule of grammar. … Continue reading

Posted in Words | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Literary Review – Philip Davis on Shakespeare and Neurology

“Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence – at the neural level – of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension”

Posted in Science, Words | Tagged | Leave a comment