Favorite online reading. If the subjunctive tense were to disappear from English, would anybody care? And just in time for this romantic weekend, a caller discovers the meaning of…lurve. That’s L-U-R-V-E.
Grant recommends a couple of favorite children’s books by Kate Banks and Georg Hallensleben: Baboon and The Night Worker. This is part of a complete episode.
Grant reads a few lines from a favorite poem: “A New Song of New Similes by John Gay. It also appears in the front of the book Intensifying Similes in English. This is part of a complete episode.
Martha and Grant share a couple of favorite online sources for reading about language: Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter and Arnold Zwicky’s blog. Be sure to check out Zwicky’s post, “Dialect dangerous to...
Grand Bargain n.— «The harder part will be trying to follow that up by creating what is coming to be known in Obama circles as a Grand Bargain: getting everyone to agree to clean up the nation’s budget mess in a really big way, one that...
There’s nothing like an oddly phrased headline to brighten your day. How about “Actor Sent to Jail for Not Finishing Sentence”? Or “Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped”? Same for signs that make you do a double take, like...