When to use i.e. in a sentence – The Oatmeal.

SOME RULES AND HINTS FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

by John Cage

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student – pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher – pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined – this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.”

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything – it might come in handy later.

via Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think. « Mapping the Marvellous.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

via Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age – NYTimes.com.

A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.

via On the Twitter Patrol – NYTimes.com.

Not until the 17th century did people begin thinking that the language needed to be codified, and the details of who would do that and how have yet to be resolved. Should it be accomplished through a government-sponsored academy, an officially sanctioned dictionary, or what? These and other means were attempted, but meanwhile ordinary folks, dang them, kept right on talking and writing however they wanted, inventing words, using contractions and so on.

via Books of The Times – ‘The Lexicographer’s Dilemma’ – Jack Lynch Explores English – Review – NYTimes.com.

In “Rapper’s Delight,” the M.C. Big Bank Hank raps, “I’m gonna rock the mic till you can’t resist,” using what was then a novel sense of rock, defined by the O.E.D. as “to handle effectively and impressively; to use or wield effectively, esp. with style or self-assurance.” To be sure, singers in the prerap era often used rock as a transitive verb, whether it was Bill Haley promising, “We’re gonna rock this joint tonight,” or the bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup more suggestively wailing, “Rock me, mama.” But the M.C.’s of early hip-hop took the verb in a new direction, transforming the microphone (abbreviated in rap circles as mic, not mike) into an emblem of stylish display. Later elaborations on the theme would allow clothes and other accessories to serve as the objects of rock, as when Kanye West boasted in a 2008 issue of Spin magazine, “I rock a bespoke suit and I go to Harold’s for fried chicken.”

via On Language – Hip-Hop Lexicography – NYTimes.com.

The full article includes some very information detail, and some criticism of Strunk & White. I love S & W, but I also love it when linguists and grammarians correct and/or criticize S & W — I’m weird like that.

Here’s the main gist of the article:

Close to the end of the Declaration comes the bold

(1)  We must… hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

Yes, yes, this was deliberate.  It’s an instance of CHIASMUS, a rhetorical figure in which elements are inverted in the second of two matched phrases, so as to foreground, and emphasize, these elements.  (It’s also an example of ASYNDETIC COORDINATION, lacking an explicit conjunction, but that’s not my topic for today.)  Still, it falls foul of Strunk & White’s 19th principle in their Elements of Style, “Express coordinate ideas in parallel form”; in fact, it’s a much bolder violation of this principle than the example that Strunk & White begin their discussion with:

via Language Log: Still more Declaration of Independence.

When talk turns to the irrationality of English spelling conventions, a five-letter emblem of our language’s foolishness inevitably surfaces: ghoti. The Christian Science Monitor, reporting on the spelling-bee protesters, laid out the familiar story (while casting some doubt on its veracity): “The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word ‘fish’ could legitimately be spelled ‘ghoti,’ by using the ‘gh’ sound from ‘enough,’ the ‘o’ sound from ‘women’ and the ‘ti’ sound from ‘action.’ ”

via On Language – Ghoti – NYTimes.com.

For the past four years, my boyfriend and I have had an ongoing argument about one sentence. When I make reference to the TV show “The Simpsons” I say, “‘The Simpsons’ is on.” Now, he thinks that I should be saying, “‘The Simpsons’ are on.” I keep telling him that the proper thing to say is “is” because I am making reference to one TV show. Please tell me which one of us is right. This argument is getting old.

Here is the answer, very well stated:

Technically, you’re right: you’re using the title of the show as a singular entity and you ought to use the singular verb, “is.” Occasionally, singular entities with plural titles are treated as plural — “The Giants are playing the Ravens.” — but that doesn’t really apply to your situation. Unless he’s referring to the members of the Simpson family in the plural, he’s got to use the singular verb here. If you mean the title of the show, you need the singular.

via The Grammar Logs — Number Four Hundred, Sixteen.

The creators of the “SarcMark” claim that we need a new punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm. They do have a point:

“When you write, you don’t have the extra information channel of intonation,” said Amy Weinberg, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland who specializes in technology. But while a symbol might help provide that extra information, she said, “I don’t know that we need one designed especially so that you have to buy it.”

There’s a small pic of the mark on the second page of this story: it looks like a period within an @ sign. Since it’s not a part of any standard font, the makers of the SarcMark are selling their punctuation as a download. Entrepreneurship meets language nerdiness? Sounds like a win-win to me!

via Sarcasm Punctuation? Like We Really Need That – ABC News.