timoni.org

As an experiment back in my teenage days, I tried to eliminate all ums, ehs, likes and pauses in my speech. More than anything, I loathed the vagueness and repetition of “I/he/she was like…”, or even just “like”. Hated the way my peers stumbled around every sentence as though they were only partially convinced they should be speaking at all.

—Jack Shedd, via marco

When I was in high school, I tried to do this, too, for a while. But eventually I realized that I actually love the word “like.” It’s a single syllable that’s both versatile and adds a casual friendliness to virtually any sentence. It’s degressive. It makes you sound a little more common-man. Like is, like, great.

★ 59 notes grammar english

“In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of ironic.”

I am going to punch the next person that erroneously points out a “misuse’ of the word ironic in a perfectly acceptable use case. I will fly in a plane to go punch them.

—Timoni

★ words english definitions thescourgeofeggers

esquilax: A legendary horse with the head of a rabbit and the body of a rabbit.

[ esquilax, via the Urban Dictionary ]

★ definition english

In the United States a pressman is a man who runs a printing press; in England he is a newspaper reporter, or, as the English usually say, a journalist.

[ Chapter 4. American and English Today, from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, 1921. ]

1921 wasn’t so long ago. I wonder when, then, did American English adopt “journalist”?

Also, I’m glad calling American English “American” never really caught on.

★ society history english

It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

[ Geoffrey K. Pullum, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, in the Chronicle Review ]

I particularly enjoyed the article’s lengthy dressing-down of eschewing* the passive voice.

*I specifically came back and added that word into the sentence.

★ english grammar

Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

Examine her portfolio here, find some new music, or follow her on Twitter, Flickr, or other places around the internet.

“In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of ironic.”

Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco. This is her blog.

Examine her portfolio here, find some new music, or follow her on Twitter, Flickr, or other places around the internet.

“In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of ironic.”

Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.