Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
The movie studios currently promote their coming attractions through press junkets. The star sits in some hotel room with a poster or prop from the movie in the background, and then a zillion reporters are run through the room for a quick “exclusive interview”. Paul Newman likened the experience to being double parked in front [...]
Archive for the ‘Language and usage’ Category
January 15th, 2012
January 7th, 2012
Category: Language and usage, MSM (mainstream media)
Jon Caulkins and I wrote an op-ed for the UK Guardian yesterday, which based on our US experience with the media was worded in a plainspoken style. The editor added a lede using the word “Manichean”. Meanwhile, next to us on the page was Hans Kundnani’s analyses of “ordoliberalism“. When I see him in London [...]
December 26th, 2011
Category: Britain, Language and usage
The Economist has a priceless article on euphemisms, which correctly cites the British as masters of the craft: British newspaper obituaries are a rich seam: nobody likes to speak ill of the dead, yet many enjoy a hint of the truth about the person who has “passed away”. A drunkard will be described as “convivial” [...]
December 3rd, 2011
Category: Elections 2010 and 2012, Language and usage
The Daily Beast’s main page is trumpeting their coverage of Herman Cain’s “Meteoric rise and sudden fall”. We discussed the strange (though old) phrase “meteoric rise” here some time ago, which generated this priceless comment Kent Fisher says: July 28, 2011 at 12:36 pm Pedant alert! Meteors neither rise nor fall. They’re not rocks, they’re [...]
November 30th, 2011
Category: Language and usage
A number of people seemed to enjoy the word puzzle I posted earlier today. I therefore post for your amusement 4 other words to be trimmed down to nothing letter by letter — same rules as the original post. Faithful reader Katja deserves credit for the first three. To solve each of hers I had [...]
November 30th, 2011
Category: Language and usage
In case you have a few minutes to kill over your lunch break today, here is a fun word game. Take a word and knock one letter off at a time until you have no letters left. However, after the removal of each letter, what remains, without re-arrangement of letters, has to be a word. [...]
November 20th, 2011
It’s time to remind ourselves what the “rotten apples” metaphor means and what it does not. It means that a even very few corrupt individuals in an organization need to be detected and dealt with quickly, because the rot otherwise quickly spreads and infects the whole system. Someone getting away with stuff is an object [...]
October 20th, 2011
Category: Language and usage
In a post last week about Herman Cain, I initially wrote that African-Americans were “staunchly loyal” Democrats. A few hours later, something about that phrase nagged at my brain, so I googled on it to make sure it was sensible. I found countless usages of the phrase, including in many respected outlets. But just be [...]
October 2nd, 2011
Hit & Run’s Tim Cavanaugh to “unemployees”: if you don’t like being discriminated against in job searches, get a job before you start.
