Category: Uncategorized
What’s wrong with the word “busboy”?
In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich looks into whether the term “busboy” is demeaning—especially when applied to a 67-year-old man—and whether it is properly replaced with “busser.”
Five Months!
Guthrie is five months old today, weighs more than 20 pounds, and will be starting rice cereal this week. All is well. Pictures! Feast your eyes! Video! Shield yourself from the drama!
UPDATED: The unfortunate consequence of using an apostrophe when pluralizing letters
It is well known among those who closely observe the writing style of newspapers that the New York Times uses an apostrophe in acronyms and initialisms that are plural, such as CD’s or DVD’s. Less well known is that the paper also uses them when writing out plural letters of the alphabet, which leads to…
Then they came for the lexicographers…
Man pleads guilty to attacking Joshua Reynolds painting with hammer. “Mark Paton, 44, was arrested Wednesday after repeatedly hitting Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of 18th-century diarist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson.”
A Way with Words is gonna kick some ass
On Wednesday, the managment of KPBS radio in San Diego, the producing station for A Way with Words, announced it would no longer produce the show. As you can imagine, my co-host Martha Barnette and I, as well as our producer, Stefanie Levine, are disappointed. As were, apparently, thousands of listeners who have in just…
He rolls over!
This evening, on his four-month birthday, Guthrie rolled over for the first time. At least, that is, according to his father who claims to have witnessed the momentous event while Mama was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Mama rushed in when she heard Papa’s cheering and found the boy looking slightly stunned to be on…
New, super-fast server; plus a request for comments
Over the weekend I moved the site to a new service provider, one offering incredible high-speed hosting for database-driven web sites (and for less than a third of what I was paying elsewhere for dismal speeds). EngineHosting has smartly shown that they understand that static web sites will soon be, if they are not already,…
Esptein vs. Epstein
It could happen to anybody, but the second summer replacement column for William Safire—which is about getting basic facts like names wrong—gets the writer’s name wrong. It’s right at the bottom—Jaimie Epstein—but wrong at the top—Jaimie Esptein. Maybe it was done purposely?
UPDATED: July 5/6: Scheduled as a guest on “Up All Night” on BBC Radio Five
My radio partner Martha Barnette and I are scheduled as guests on the BBC Radio Five show Up All Night. We’ll be taking language questions from listeners very much as we do on our own radio show, public radio’s A Way With Words. If all goes as planned, we’ll be on Up All Night at:…
America’s identity theft: what to call an American instead of “American”? And in French?
Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart, copy editors for the French newspaper Le Monde who also co-edit the blog Langue Sauce Piquante (which I’ve linked to from the cohort page for years), address a long-standing issue: if “American” should apply to all people from North, Central, and South America, then what should we call citizens of…