Pat’s Polemics

When Maya Lin was announced as the winning designer of the projected Viet Nam War Memorial, I am sure I read or heard that she (Continue Reading)

Thinking of how “represent” is used without an object in current slang (always a question when a word is used by African-Americans: is it Af-Am (Continue Reading)

The expressions “go to sleep” and “go to work” are frozen expressions from a time when “go to” was used as an ingressive aspect marker. (Continue Reading)

On flteach many years ago a teacher related how a colleague Sp teacher travelled to Mexico and marveled how well educated even the hotel maids (Continue Reading)

I heard a person of middling education use the subjunctive on the radio this morning: “… it’s important that Congress have…..” and he was not (Continue Reading)

I was just reading on the culture of complaint in David Crystal’s Stories of English and then read in my Norwegian grammar a little on (Continue Reading)

Listening to Karen Armstrong read, her cultivated Oxbridge accent is soothing. She uses ‘et’ for the past tense of ‘eat’ and pronounces ‘prance’ and ‘trance’ (Continue Reading)

The 1969 song, covered by many artists, gives rise to some misunderstandings, especially if you are not from the South. My wife, from East Texas, (Continue Reading)

Lots of people think the em of “I hid them” > “I hid ‘em” is a contraction, which it is not even though the em (Continue Reading)

Look at this construction: It hasn’t been being cleaned. Isn’t that a pretty normal construction to hear? It is a progressive past passive, third person (Continue Reading)

The Job Interview instantiates the dicta of the teacher and in this way performs the role that Judgment Day plays among the faithful. It’s when (Continue Reading)

While Ambrose Bierce has a place in American letters, he does not have one in the scientific study of English or any other language. Again, (Continue Reading)

Debra wrote: I realize that “may I?” (asking permission) has been replaced in common student speech with “can I?”: Can I sharpen my pencil? Can (Continue Reading)

Those of you who suppose yourselves to insist on “grammatically correct English” might want to wrap your heads around this. Notice that the periphrastic future (Continue Reading)

An example of how people think about language would be explaining archaic usages that have survived in formulaic verses, prayers, etc. as something other than (Continue Reading)

A quote from an 1854 report by British supercargoes [similar to a load master on a military aircraft] using/abusing “whom”: “….their implements stolen and themselves (Continue Reading)

Recently I cracked my wife up by reading to her out of John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue where McWhorter describes in deadpan linguistic jargon (Continue Reading)

For those who think we have no dual in English, note “either”, “each of two”, from   “…Old English aegther (before 900), contraction of aeghwaether (Continue Reading)

This phrase is ambiguous: are the words confusing or is someone confusing them?   Here are three words that I believe are confusing because they (Continue Reading)

On one listserv polemics broke out several times over the adverbial use of “good”. One time the phrase that elicited outrage was, “How are you?” (Continue Reading)

– about half-way through Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. It’s clear McWhorter is applying the same techniques to English that he has to the Spanish Creoles (Continue Reading)

The following is a series of posts and the last one should be read first. Following that last one are some additional comments to the (Continue Reading)

Here’s an idiom or saying that is on the verge of incomprehensibility: dumb as a post For people who do not know that dumb means (Continue Reading)