Grammarly is the worst. Seriously, it is. I don’t mean their silly little grammar and spelling checker thing. I’m sure that’s a perfectly adequate proofreading tool, doing its best to reinforce people’s deep-seated insecurities about writing every time they touch a keyboard.…
In the field of linguistics, we tend to make a distinction between two ways of thinking about language and grammar: prescriptivism and descriptivism.
How close would we come to the apocalypse without grammar snobs’ friendly reminders that we don’t use language “properly”? My never-ending fascination with the minds of grammar snobs has led me to an interesting finding. At least in the minds…
In a couple of previous posts, I talked about how powerful people’s pet peeves about others’ language were being used to justify prejudices. As I pointed out, some educators and some business leaders are utilizing arbitrary ideas about language to draw unwarranted…
Lingua Franca is a blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education that I enjoy reading especially for Anne Curzan‘s and Geoffrey Pullum‘s excellent posts, but all of the contributors write about language, and so I’m a regular reader. Today, there was…
linguistic pulse 