Last week a comma splice almost got me into trouble at work. A comma splice is when you link two independent clauses with a comma, creating a run-on sentence. For instance: My holiday in Greece was nice, I’m going to go back next year. Comma splices are often frowned upon by the people who specialise [...]
Thanks to Nigel Grant on Twitter, I discover that Sainsbury’s receipts now carry this line at the bottom: Based on price perception data, you can live well for less than you thought at Sainsbury’s. Nigel asks the obvious question: “Eh??” It can only mean: “We’re cheaper than people think.” Although of course they don’t want [...]
The Plain English Campaign is an odd little beast. From its website, it seems to be partly a small writing/editing consultancy and partly an eccentric pressure group. On the business side, it publishes some passable guidance on writing plainly, runs a string of training courses on plain English, and offers editing services to help clients [...]
It’s National Grammar Day in the USA, and to celebrate, Mark Allen has been running a grammar haiku contest. As he opened it up to entries from across the world, I had a few goes: Pedants must be told What they can go and stick their Prepositions up We’ll not be so well Without the [...]
Every snowflake is unique. Every fingerprint is unique. These facts may be interesting, but they don’t mean that every snowflake or every fingerprint is interesting. Yesterday I was editing some copy and came across a description of the brain as “this unique organ”. This was meant to be a compliment to the brain, but instead [...]
It was the end of a PE lesson, and I was putting my shoes back on. “Mrs Cook, can you tie my laces?” I asked. “Yes,” Mrs Cook said, “I can.” She gave me that teachery look of hers and waited for me to figure it out. That was when I was seven. Since then, [...]
With Christmas coming up, I’d like your recommendations for books about language. I’m looking for something more substantial and engaging than, say, Lynne Truss but not as demanding as a full-blown academic linguistics textbook. Three books I’ve heard encouraging things about are: Strictly English by Simon Heffer The Language Wars: A History of Proper English [...]
At McSweeney’s, Eric K Auld has some good bar jokes involving grammar and punctuation. Here are some of my own, stretching the concept to cover language more broadly: A subject and a verb disagrees about which bar to walk into. An Oxford comma hops, skips, and jumps into a bar. A pleonasm enters into a [...]
According to the Guardian recently, “the Treasury select committee is on a collision course with the Bank of England”, some Egyptian campaign groups are “on a guaranteed collision course with the ruling generals”, Boris Johnson is “on collision course with unions over tube plans” as well as being “on a collision course with two Tory [...]
All that is necessary for the triumph of corporate jargon is that sensible people be lulled into internalising it. There are people – maybe you work with some of them – who would rather say this: Going forward, a resource has been tasked to action any additional issues experienced by customers around internal environmental controls. [...]
