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Language Corner

  1. December 20, 2010 01:29 PM

    Just One of Those Things

    Choosing between singular and plural

    By Merrill Perlman

    Be the hit of your holiday party! Amaze your friends! Impress your family! Be one of those people who uses the correct verb in the phrasing of “one of those”!

    Of course, unless one of those people are really steeped in English, not many are likely to notice that in both of those “one of those” phrases, the verb was...

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  2. December 13, 2010 12:15 PM

    Spellbound

    Different spellings, different words

    By Merrill Perlman

    Much has been written about the dangers of using spelling checkers without brain in gear. Spelling checkers won’t tell you when you use “there” when you meant “their,” “then” when you meant “than,” or “window” when you meant “widow,” as we did a few weeks back.

    A poem that makes the rounds of copy editors every so...

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  3. December 6, 2010 12:47 PM

    Grainy Picture

    ‘Granularity’ and other business jargon

    By Merrill Perlman

    For a number of years, some attendees of jargon-heavy business meetings have played “Buzzword Bingo”: Someone prints out cards with terms used almost nowhere outside of corporate boardrooms—words like “reach out to,” “incentivize,” and “drill down.” As each “buzzword” is uttered by someone in the meeting, it is marked off on attendees’ cards. The first one to get...

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  4. December 1, 2010 04:17 PM

    A Matter of Taste

    On "gourmet," "gourmand," and loving food

    By Merrill Perlman

    When a word takes on unwanted connotations, people seeking a replacement often settle on something close, thinking, perhaps, that the words are synonyms. Sometimes, though, the new word comes with unwanted connotations, too.

    Take “gourmet.” From a noun referring to a fine judge of wine, over the years it came to mean a connoisseur of good food and...

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  5. November 29, 2010 02:40 PM

    Never the More

    Replacing a word in a quotation can lead to trouble

    By Merrill Perlman

    What happens when a public official misspeaks? Should a news outlet edit the quotation, paraphrase it, or just leave it be?

    This happens every day, of course, and news outlets often edit quotations by inserting ellipses in them, or by inserting something in brackets or parentheses as explanation or substitution.

    Here’s one example, from the controversy over the nomination...

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  6. November 22, 2010 11:31 AM

    Degrees of Rejection

    ‘Refudiate’ may have a use after all

    By Merrill Perlman

    The “words of the year” lists are beginning to appear, and we’re generally going to ignore them, since those words so often disappear.

    But the selection of “refudiate” as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year presents an irresistible opportunity.*

    No, we’re not going to ridicule Sarah Palin. First of all, this is not a political...

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  7. November 15, 2010 12:38 PM

    Passing the Blame

    A “scapegoat” by any other name ...

    By Merrill Perlman

    Antonio Pierce, on ESPN, was talking about how the Washington Redskins seemed to be blaming their quarterback for a lot of their troubles. “I think they’re using Donovan McNabb as an escape goat,” he said.

    Pierce probably meant “scapegoat,” of course, and has been kidded a lot about it. But “escape goat” is showing up a lot in transcripts...

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  8. November 8, 2010 02:42 PM

    Stock Answers

    A stylebook takes on financial terms

    By Merrill Perlman

    If you’ve been reading too much “financial porn,” you might be tempted by the “skirt-length theory” and try to “buy the dips” of a “widow-and-orphan stock,” and then hope for a “dead cat bounce” so you can do some “naked shorting.”

    Those are all terms used in the business world, and among the entries in the new Financial Writer’s Stylebook:...

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  9. November 1, 2010 01:52 PM

    Leading Questions

    How some journalism terms were born

    By Merrill Perlman

    The Associated Press recently said it would stop using some wire-service jargon as instructions on its stories. Among them were “sted,” for “instead of”; “graf” for “paragraph”; and “lede,” for the top of a story. Those had been around for more than seventy-five years, and their derivations may be a mystery to some, especially those under forty. Here’s a primer...

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  10. October 25, 2010 03:00 PM

    Boo!

    Scary words

    By Merrill Perlman

    Halloween is next week, and thousands of people are “scarifying” their houses in anticipation of the hordes of trick-or-treating children. Why people have taken to decorating houses as if it were Christmas is a subject for a column on marketing, not language, so we’ll dispense with that.

    Instead, we’ll focus on words appropriate to the season.

    “Scarify,” the first...

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  11. October 18, 2010 01:13 PM

    Overly Possessive

    Why the lack of an apostrophe sometimes isn’t wrong

    By Merrill Perlman

    A student recently asked why she had been corrected when she wrote “The teacher’s union voted to strike.” That’s easy: A union of only one teacher would be a lonely place indeed. “Teacher” had to be “teachers.”

    But what puzzled the student was why her professor had corrected the error to read “teachers union.” Wasn’t that just as wrong, the...

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  12. October 11, 2010 12:48 PM

    Loan Ranger

    Money can change a noun to a verb

    By Merrill Perlman

    The reporter seemingly couldn’t make up his mind. In an article about a mayor’s financial problem, the reporter used a number of verbs to describe how the mayor had “borrowed” money from the campaign:

    The mayor’s “personal financial problems have raised questions about how he was able to lend his mayoral campaign $20,000 in April …”

    “State law allows candidates...

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  13. October 4, 2010 12:34 PM

    Who, I?

    When personal pronouns don’t get along

    By Merrill Perlman

    If you go to Language Corner’s Facebook page (and while you’re there, you may as well “like” it), you’ll see a number of posts from Ron Sharp about people writing or saying things like “she called him and I on the phone.” Sharp says that “the incorrect use of I when me is required is a pet peeve” for...

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  14. September 30, 2010 04:59 PM

    Echo Chamber

    On redundant acronyms and initialisms

    By Merrill Perlman

    An acronym or initialism can become so familiar that we forget what it stands for and add one of its own words back. A pin, or personal identification number, already has “number” in it, so adding “number” is redundant. ATM (an initialism, since it’s not pronounced as a word) stands for automated teller machine, so “machine” is redundant. (In...

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