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To infinitely split with sense

Last month I wrote about the unhappy consequences of avoiding split infinitives – a silly superstition that leads writers and editors who believe in it to sometimes make a mush of otherwise lucid...

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BBC crash blossom: Girl murders car?

It’s a while since Sentence first featured a crash blossom – those headlines that lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking – so here’s one from the front page of today’s BBC news website:...

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Anti-anti-Americanismism

A recent article on the BBC America website features “10 Things Americans Say… and What They Really Mean”. It begins with an unpromising generalisation and a gratuitous sideswipe: When it comes to the...

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A comma, which muddles meaning

From a Guardian editorial of 14 November: There is another lesson to the Petraeus affair. The former general fashioned for himself a role, which is much more significant than top generals have during...

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Howling ambiguities

As a lazy Sunday offering, a selection of entries from Denys Parsons’ entertaining book It Must Be True: Classic Newspaper Howlers, Bloomers, and Misprints. They’re not referenced in detail,...

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Book review: The Old Editor Says, by John McIntyre

Many of you know John E. McIntyre, night editor at the Baltimore Sun and purveyor of consistently good sense on language and editing – evident on his blog You Don’t Say, which I read daily and often...

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Bang, pling, boing, shriek, gasper, screamer, Christer! And other exclamation...

Henry Hitchings’s terrific book The Language Wars has a brief note on old names for exclamation marks (aka exclamation points): Exclamation and question marks were not much used until the seventeenth...

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Book review: Sick English, by Janet Byron Anderson

Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome,...

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The trouble with ‘fulsome’

The word fulsome is used quite regularly by public figures in Ireland, often politicians promising or demanding apologies. Whenever this happens, it is criticised as an “incorrect” usage: see for...

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Pronouns, humans, and dormice

The kinds of things relative pronouns refer to in modern English can be divided roughly as follows: that – things and people which – things, but not normally people who – normally people, not things,...

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More clichéd than previously thought

A lesser known cliché in journalism, especially science reporting, is the construction than previously thought. It doesn’t always take that precise form – sometimes it’s than originally thought, or...

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Dictionary updates and etymological commutes

At Macmillan Dictionary Blog I’ve been writing about digital dictionaries and everyday etymologies. The dictionary recently underwent a major update. News media tend to cover this by focusing on new...

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Book review: ‘For Who the Bell Tolls’ by David Marsh

For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection is a new book by David Marsh, production editor of the Guardian and editor of its style guide and language blog. The ironic title and...

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Book review: ‘Phubbing All Over The World’ by Hugh Westbrook

Phubbing All Over The World: The Words of 2013 is a book by Hugh Westbrook about the neologisms and usages that made headlines in the last 12 months. Over 100-odd short pages, Westbrook repurposes...

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The pedantic, censorious quality of “sic”

Jessica Mitford, in The American Way of Death,* quotes a text that uses compliment when complement was intended, and adds [sic] to indicate this. What’s of interest here is the footnote she then...

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BBC News style guide now globally available

I do enjoy a good style guide: browsing the alphabetical entries, reading the general advice sections, learning how organisations handle sensitive subjects, and seeing how different publishers treat...

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To offensively split infinitives

I like the Economist and admire its commitment to a clear, plain style of writing. This makes it harder to excuse its perplexing stance on split infinitives. Its style guide says the rule prohibiting...

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Readers say find headline syntax weird

A news story at Reuters last week had a striking bit of syntax in its headline: This unorthodox grammatical construction is not unusual in headlines, but I didn’t make a note of it before. A quick...

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Non-life-threatening unselfconscious hyphens

Happy the reader who is unselfconscious about hyphens. Or is it unself-conscious? Un-selfconscious? When we add a prefix to a word that’s already (sometimes) hyphenated, it’s not always obvious whether...

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Departing wisdom

*[click to enlarge] * It took me a moment to figure out this headline in today’s Irish Times. I wondered if it might be a novel or obscure sense of depart in sports journalism that had escaped my...

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