The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
It has long been noted that style manuals and other usage advice frequently contain unintended examples of the usage they condemn. (This is sometimes referred to as
Hartman's law or
Muphry's law - an intentional misspelling of Murphy.)
Starting from this observation, Joseph Williams' paper
The Phenomenology of Error offers an examination of our selective attention to different types of grammatical and usage errors that goes beyond the descriptivism-prescriptivism debate. (alternate
pdf link for "The Phenomenology of Error")
[more inside]
posted by nangar
on Nov 28, 2011 -
17 comments
Are birds’ tweets grammatical? [Scientific American] But are the rules of grammar unique to human language? Perhaps not, according to a recent study, which showed that songbirds may also communicate using a sophisticated grammar—a feature absent in even our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates. Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University
performed a series of experiments to determine whether Bengalese finches expect the notes of their tunes to follow a certain order.
posted by Fizz
on Nov 3, 2011 -
31 comments
In the late Sixties and early Seventies several experiments were begun to test whether or not a non-human primate could construct a sentence. Several species were involved in these various experiments including the chimpanzees
Washoe and
Nim, a gorilla named
Koko, and later in the Eighties work began with a bonobo named
Kanzi. While great progress was made in teaching these primates a vocabulary, it would be difficult to see any of these experiments as a success. And all of these projects raised important questions about the
ethics of such experiments.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Aug 20, 2011 -
39 comments
I’m not advocating the abolition of grammar, but rather its justification. I’m not quite sure what that will entail in the end, but I’m starting out by pointing out grammar rules that just don’t make sense, don’t work, or don’t have any justification. All I want is for our rules of grammar to be well-motivated.
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 10, 2010 -
90 comments
"When I was in New York, I fell in love with some wild ideas in the shape of a woman. An English teacher, who was hard, but hard like a job I never wanted to end. But to her, I wasn't nothin' but a day at the office. That's what they call a
Double Negative."
posted by redsparkler
on Aug 3, 2010 -
34 comments
The Canadian Government’s
Translation Bureau recently made its French/English/Spanish technical terminology database,
Termium, free to access after over a decade as a subscription-based service. While off-the-cuff translations are often available from free services like
BabelFish, Termium focuses on technical terminology such as scientific, medical and legal terms.
[more inside]
posted by Shepherd
on Oct 22, 2009 -
35 comments
The research, literary, and copy editors of Vanity Fair
go to town on Sarah Palin's resignation speech.
seeing as nearly everyone I talked to at the 10th meetup was an editor of some kind, you'll all get a kick out of this
posted by Jon_Evil
on Jul 20, 2009 -
79 comments
Long and short of it continues in part 2 I loved reading
the first part of this series and it now has the second part that I have put link to.
Long and short of it goes deeper into an important topic: Whether we should have a long sentence or a short one when describing things. I would well go with the long sentence as written by Charles Dickens on his novel Oliver Twist a century ago. But it seems quite a few people prefer short ones! What's your take on this.
posted by susanharper
on Dec 2, 2008 -
54 comments
Confusing Words is a collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.
posted by blue_beetle
on Aug 11, 2008 -
76 comments
Immediately, Herson spotted an offense—a second-floor awning outside a tarot shop that advertised "Energy Stone's." They climbed the stairs to the second floor and approached a middle-age women with a quizzical expression. "We happened to notice the sign for energy stones," Deck said, "and there happens to be an extra apostrophe. 'Stone's' doesn't need the apostrophe."
"And?" she asked, her voice flat with annoyance.
"And we wanted to bring it to your attention," Deck said.
A look inside the daring lives of Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, vanguards of the
Typo Eradication Advancement League.
posted by Rhaomi
on May 21, 2008 -
84 comments
"The old, mean man" vs. "The mean old man." Here's an aspect of English (and other languages) I've never thought of before. If you're using a string of adjectives, there's a natural order for them to appear in: "opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose". (Although I find "old, mean," due to it's strange order, sort of striking.) [more info:
1,
2,
3]
posted by grumblebee
on May 19, 2007 -
91 comments
John Humphrys is a
militant grammarian: "We all care about language. Your concern may be different from the young hoodie's." On the other hand, he may have a
point: "The simple fact is we cannot afford to be careless with our language, because if we are careless with our language then we are careless with our world and sooner or later we will be lost for words to describe what we have allowed to happen to it." (
via)
posted by anotherpanacea
on Nov 8, 2006 -
39 comments
The Passivator. A passive verb and adverb flagger for Mozilla-derived browsers, Safari, and Opera 7.5, with caveats.
posted by semmi
on Jan 6, 2006 -
54 comments
English names for
groups various creatures are often bizarre. Many of the stranger collective nouns came from the
Boke of St. Albans. Most lists don't include a "parliament of rooks" any longer. Lists of collective animal names are available for
children and
adults. Though, oddly there doesn't seem to be a collective name for humans as a species, numerous names (mostly silly) exist for types of
human groups.
Dispute does exist in the world of collective nouns. Officially monkeys are grouped in "troops", but most people would agree that the proper term for a group of monkeys is
barrel . However debate seems to have been closed on the subject of the proper term for a group of
tentacle monsters (NSFW).
Of course, you have to know how the
proper grammar when using collective nouns.
posted by sotonohito
on Aug 10, 2005 -
33 comments
According to Stanley Fish , "Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are." The solution: make them invent their own language.
After a generation that privileged content to the exclusion of form, is the pendulum swinging back the other way?
posted by myl
on May 31, 2005 -
134 comments
