From the category archives:

Language

The Dangling Participle

July 23, 2007

The Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb outlined by blogger Brian Clark are indeed the five errors I most commonly see when reading blogs. In the first part of my Diary of a Storyteller, I detailed my amazement at the way the Internet allows people to establish authority as writers in spite of [...]

Ramesh Satkurunath’s Portmanteaux

July 14, 2007

In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Humpty Dumpty and Alice discuss the poem, ‘Jabberwocky’. The egg explains the word “slithy”: “Well, ‘slithy‘ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Both before and after [...]