I know a few people who should take heed of today’s xkcd: Sometimes you just gotta pick your battles.
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Hopefully – Not the end of the world
The Associated Press have conceded that ‘hopefully’ as a sentence adverb (‘it is to be hoped that’) is legitimate usage. But will it bring about the cataclysmic destruction of the civilised world as prophesied? Aidan Wilson thinks not.
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Why Muriel Heslop is not as dumb as the Australian Financial Review
Plenty of us baulked at the use of “blacks” in this headline… But the Fin Review’s new editor, Mike Stuchbury, thought it was fine… There are times when we all need a grammar marm to help straighten us out and it seems that for Mike Stutchbury, that time is now…
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‘A more exacting censorship’
James McElvenny writes… We’re not the ones to blame for the moral decline that characterises our times, where the pre-show program for kids’ TV stars a cussin’ Communications Minister, no less. It’s our grandparents and great grandparents who are at fault. If only they’d listened to the advice of Mr S H Smith, Director of [...]
READ MOREWhat’s prescriptivism all about, anyway?
James McElvenny writes: The world of blogging – as I’m sure Fully (sic)’s readers have already noticed – consists largely of rants and counter-rants. A favourite counter-rant for a modern, scientific and progressive-minded blog like this one is to have a go at linguistic prescriptivists, those who work themselves up into a rage because other [...]
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One pancakes?
Greg Dickson writes:… When the waitperson brought my pancakes, she offered it saying, “One pancakes?”. One pancakes?
READ MOREA quixotic debate
Aidan Wilson writes: Last week, an argument was waged in the Opinion section of the Sydney Morning Herald about the effect of the internet on language. It started with an article on Tuesday about Australian author Cate Kennedy, who fears literature is being threatened by the internet. She’s referring specifically to writers who become addicted [...]
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