Published in Language is easy; writing is hard.·Oct 10, 2014I Literally Don’t Care How You Use the Word “Literally”Does your ire fire up when you hear someone use literally in the following context: “She literally chewed my ear off, going on and on about how she met what’s his name from that movie.”* If your face has turned bright red and you’re figuratively blowing off some steam, you…5 min read
Published in Language is easy; writing is hard.·Jul 29, 2014Lay It Down and Lie LowThe Battle Between Two Misunderstood Verbs — Most Americans cannot tell the difference between the verbs lay (to place) and lie (to recline). It’s a sad truth. Actually, most Americans think that lay means both to place and to recline. And that lie means solely to fib. …5 min read
May 18, 2014The Strange Case of He Versus Him, and Other Pronoun (Mis)applicationsSometimes proper English sounds strange to us. — In Michael Jackson’s classic “The Girl Is Mine,” a duet with Paul McCartney in which a ménage a trois seems to be out of the question, Paul pleads to the unseen, unnamed girl, “I love you more than he.” I smile every time I hear this lyric because, in the…5 min read
Mar 20, 2014The Joy of AnagramsMixing it up, for pleasure’s sake — For a while now I’ve been obsessed with anagrams. Totally obsessed. Bloody tasteless, you say? A less bloody test, I say. Everyone should “Self Anagram,” that is, rearrange the letters of your name to spell something else. I particularly like my Self Anagram I ZAP A BULLOCK. It was timely…3 min read
Published in Language & Lingustics·Mar 5, 2014The Closing Quotation Mark DilemmaThree simple rules to keep your punctuation marks in their right place — My biggest punctuation pet peeve involves quotation marks. I get very self-righteous and snobby whenever I espy misplaced ones. If you don’t know the first thing about using quotation marks in relation to other punctuation in standard American English, dear reader, read on. …5 min read
Feb 11, 2014The Double El(l) DilemmaHow one man’s spelling rules made me a true American — Paul Zablocki (graphic made using Pages on an iMac) Here’s a question certain to divide the English-speaking masses. How do you spell the past tense of cancel? If you answer canceled, then you and I probably would agree on many other issues of grammar. If your spelling contains two l’s…4 min read
Feb 2, 2014Growing Up in the Presence of SpiritsWhen should children learn about alcohol? — Having been on a month-long cleanse, I am ready to start drinking again. Not that I need a drink, but I do miss two aspects of the bibulous life. The first is the way alcohol makes me feel: more social, a little braver, a little sexier; the second involves the…9 min read
