Blog
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A Most Unfortunate Comma
Few commas cause as much irritation as the one falling after the state in constructions such as this: Annapolis, MD, is a great place to visit. People are no less happy when it pops up here: Ed Begley, Jr., is a funny actor. And the irritation isn’t just from those who prefer Baltimore or the […]
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Bring Out Your Dead!
While reading Mary Roach’s fascinating and surprisingly humorous Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, I came across this sentence: “A series of modern-day Burke-and-Hare–type killings took place barely ten years ago, in Barranquilla, Colombia.” In the 1820s, William Burke and William Hare became notorious for selling corpses to Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox, who eagerly […]
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Now That’s a Fire
People love to point out other people’s mistakes. Sometimes this is done with an encouraging word and a gentle smile. More often, it’s done less kindly, and is perhaps accompanied by a pointed finger and raucous laughter (try tripping over a rug at a cocktail party sometime). Whatever the case, people generally feel a smug […]
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Lie Down Already
Today I finished a book I had been looking forward to reading, and in fact the book had been a Christmas gift from my daughter, making me savor its reading all the more. I won’t name the book, though, because however much I enjoyed it—and I enjoyed it immensely—there was an incorrect usage throughout. And […]
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Excuse the Intrusion
Damned if sometimes things don’t just look funny. The other day I ran across an “a vs. an” issue that I can’t recall having even thought about before. As we know, when choosing whether to use a or an, we decide based on whether the word the article precedes begins with a vowel or a […]
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Going to the Well Once Too Often
One guy sits at the bar in his favorite watering hole. Another guy sits down next to him. After a brief exchange, it’s established that the second guy is from out of town. The first guy asks after the football team in the second guy’s home city. The second guy says, “They’re looking really well […]
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Now I’m Lookin’ at a Flashback Sunday
Quite some time ago, I was critiquing catalog write-ups, some of which I’d written, in a roomful of writers and marketers. A particular piece contained a phrase that read something like this: “A tale where such and such . . .” I made the suggestion that we change “where” to “in which.” One of the […]
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Epistolaries at Dawn; or, POV Carousel
You enter the tavern. Beyond a smattering of tables—some occupied, some not—a boy in grubby attire kneels by a hearth and pokes at a well-stoked fire. You feel the warmth of the blaze on your face and rub your hands together, glad to have found shelter from the night’s chill winds. You are led to […]
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Double Genitive: It Only Sounds Dirty
Sarah squeezed John’s hand with enough force that, were it coal, she might have produced a diamond, but John scarcely noticed. The delivery room dissolved into a white and grey void where all that existed was his child, entering the world in a feat of biological wonder that, though he didn’t know it at the […]