Required Reading – Who, What, Why: When did we start saying ‘blah, blah, blah’?

The BBC reports: A Xerox ad from 1995 used the term to show off colour printing: A row erupted during a question-and-answer session by a local newspaper in Oregon when a politician took exception to a reporter writing “blah blah blah” in a notebook. How did these words become part of the lexicon, asks Kate … Continue reading →

Required Reading – The Utopian Origins of Restroom Symbols

Steven Heller writes, Navigating through sprawling airports and massive sports stadiums is frustrating enough with them, and traversing through such a labyrinthine world is unimaginable without them. I refer to those minimal pictographs of man, woman, child, car, sink, toilet, etc., that—like the five famous musical notes used to communicate with aliens in Close Encounters of … Continue reading →

Required Reading – English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet

Megan Garber writes, Let’s start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism. The word “because,” in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, “because” has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I’m … Continue reading →

Required Reading – A Brief History of Dude

J.J. Gould writes, Contemplate this, dude: that when I call you dude, there’s a whole range of things I might mean—you’ll understand me from my intonation and the overall context—but each time, I’m also reinforcing a specific kind of social relationship. No matter how I use the word, it always implies the same thing: solidarity without … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Oxford Dictionary Adds “twerk,” “derp,” “selfie,” “phablet,” and more voguish vocabulary”

Siraj Datoo writes, Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO) is adding a slew of words that only recently came into general usage, many driven by fast-moving trends in technology and culture. Yes, “twerk” is now in the dictionary. The most relevant addition to the dictionary for Quartz readers is probably “phablet,” a portmanteau of “phone” and “tablet” used to … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Ellipses… Why so common? What are they really for?

Matthew J.X. Madley writes, What the … Why everyone and your mother started using ellipses … everywhere. Earlier this summer, Choire Sicha, the writer, editor, and co-founder of the Awl, came to an unpleasant realization. His emails, he noticed, had veered into the realm of the ridiculous. “Suddenly, one day,” he recalls, “I was delivering … Continue reading →

Labelling the “Boston Bombers”

After the Boston Marathon bombing, I felt guilty in wondering whether the suspects were Muslim and hoping that they weren’t.  I have spent the past few weeks trying to counter the idea in my AP English class and especially in my 8th grade English classes that not everyone in the Middle East is a terrorist, … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Words Appearing in Newspapers Controversially

This article in The Economist summarizes the Associated Press’s recent move to eliminate “illegal immigrant” from its usage to ward against “[reducing] well-rounded human beings to avatars of lawlessness.”  It continues with the reactions of the group Americans for Legal Immigration, which announced it would now adopt the phrase “illegal invaders:” This line of thinking is … Continue reading →

Required Reading – The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns

Check out this read.  Henry Hitchings writes, In my previous essay, I wrote about nominalization — the deployment as nouns of words we mostly expect to encounter as verbs or adjectives. Aware of many people’s tendency to vilify this kind of usage, I speculated about the psychology behind it. I was interested in thinking about … Continue reading →

Required Reading – AP dumps ‘illegal immigrant’ but not neutrality

Roy Peter Clark’s article reinforces that banning a certain term or phrase does not make it apolitical.  As I wrote earlier this week, The use of “undocumented” changes the conversation.  By replacing the more offensive word with a less offensive one portrays the noun (person) it identifies – whether covertly or overtly – in a … Continue reading →