I recently heard from an old friend who had stumbled upon my website. He said he was shocked when he read this line from my bio: My family says that anymore at the end of the last sentence sounds wrong, but it’s all good. This line piqued his interest because he also puts anymore at the ends of sentences, but his wife doesn’t – even though she grew up somewhat close to where he did. And she has commented about how his family does it as well. My website made him think that maybe this wasn’t something that only his family said. And indeed he’s right! It’s called “positive anymore” and there ar ..read more

But this time it’s… on purpose? What?! Yesterday, Benji Smith became the main character on Writer Twitter. It turns out that Mr. Smith has created a database of novels that he obtained through probably illegal means. Smith used this database in his Prosecraft project, which published statistics about each novel, such as its word count, the number of adverbs in each, and something called the “vividness” of the writing style (I’m not really sure what that means and Smith doesn’t provide a good definition). He was also using this database to promote his word processor program Shaxpir 4, which is ..read more

Content warning: This post is about harmful language and it contains words that are used to dehumanize people. Please take caution. In April 2023, the Atlantic published a 2,500-word opinion piece complaining about language equity style guides. The attack on these guides is misleading, wrong, and harmful. It continually misrepresents the style guides. It shows a misunderstanding of the content and the point of them. It refuses to accept others and expresses contempt for anything that doesn’t fit the author’s narrow and outdated idea of language. And it gives fuel to the fascists in their cultu ..read more

Is this dude about to mansplain mansplaining? Hoo boy. Here we go. This is going to be a long post. I’ll go through each part of the article with my usual irreverence, but don’t be fooled. Thomas’s ideas about language are a real danger to women. So I’ll comment seriously on that as well. Let’s get to it. tl;dr – Andrew Thomas is incredibly wrong about mansplaining. He cites no sources to back up his claim that men and women have different communication styles, except for one limited study from 40 years ago. Modern linguistic research disproves Thomas’s ideas, and in fact his ideas are about ..read more

I was recently asked about the meaning of the phrase Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more video games or games, unlimited games, but no more games? On first glance, this phrase may not seem to work (and it kind of doesn’t – more on that below), but it gets used around the internet and people understand it. So that means it does work. What gives? What even is this phrase? I was unfamiliar with the phrase before being asked about it. I figured it had already become copypasta*, or a piece of text that is copied and spread around the internet. In that case the question as a whole ta ..read more

(Or something more Star Wars-y. Sorry, I’m a different kind of nerd.) You have to be careful out there with posts on the interwebs about grammar. Case in point: this Medium post that showed up when we were doing a search in class. It ties in to some of my recent posts. The post is called “Yes, Yoda’s Grammar is Technically Correct” and overall it’s correct. Yoda’s grammar is fine (if a bit stilted). The grammar in this post though… not so much. The first claim of this post is more of the same old: Every complete English sentence contains a subject and a predicate, with the subject being what ..read more

After my recent discovery that a whole ton of sites online don’t know what a Subject is, I couldn’t resist looking at their idea of what a Direct Object is. Surprise! They get that one wrong too. And for almost exactly the same reasons. Womp womp. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. So if grammar is something that interests you and if actually want to be right about it, read on to learn what a Direct Object is – and also what it is not. Of course Grammarly is on the top here. Of course it is. *groan* What is a Direct Object and how do we know? The Direct Object in a sentence is a syntactic e ..read more

In the episode 18 of the seventh season of the tv show The Flash, the main character said a very interesting thing: That’s future us’s problem. Barry Allen using a phrasal genitive on The Flash s07e18 This line is said by the main character on the show, Barry Allen, who is also the superhero The Flash (played by Grant Gustin). It caught my eye right away because I wrote about something similar a couple of years ago. In that article, I discussed the genitive ’s being added onto prepositions at the end of a noun phrase, such as “The woman who I was just talking to’s mother is a famous author ..read more

NPR recently re-aired their interview with Sir Patrick Stewart and he makes some comments about language. These reminded me of some comments he made when he was on “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” Both of these are about Stewart’s regional variety (aka dialect or accent). So let’s hear Professor Jean-Luc X. Picard in his own words! Before going any further, be aware that Stewart and the interviewers use the words accent and dialect in ways that linguists would not. Neither of them are really dismissive when they use these words, but their use nicely shows why linguists prefer the word variety. The ..read more

Ok, the title of this post is a bit misleading. Google doesn’t “know” anything. It just grabs some text from a website and puts it up top to give people an answer to their question. The problem here is that the answer they give you is wrong. Because the website that Google uses is wrong. But there’s more than that. The answer that Google gives has been called a “massive overgeneralization” by Huddleston and Pullum. And if that’s not bad enough, all of the results in the Google search give you the exact same incorrect answer. What the what? Check out this recent search on Google for “the subjec ..read more