April 11, 2011
Grammar
As a follow-up to yesterday’s Who’s Gropin’ Whom? post, consider this lovely illustration of the endless fluidity of meaning and parts of speech: Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas. I saw this quote on the lovely Tumblr blog Starlight and Moonbeams. But the quote originates from Groucho Marx, who phrased it a [...]
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March 24, 2011
Punctuation
In yesterday’s post, Kurt Vonnegut trashed the semi-colon as a transvestite hermaphrodite (or was it a hermaphrodite transvestite?) whose main purpose is to show off the writer’s college education. Anger issues, Kurt? I love this equally vivid but much more generous view of the misunderstood and maligned mark: Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, [...]
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