37 Deeply Satisfying Palindromes

The list, care of BuzzFeed.

Rappers, Ranked by Vocabulary Size

Enjoy.

English is Crazy

Grammar's Great Divide - the Oxford Comma

79 Words You're Probably Saying Wrong

Semicolon

For the Love of Commas

Benjamin Samuel makes a passionate defense of the comma in McSweeney's.

From the piece...

10. Dear Benjamin,

I return you to this salutation. See how that comma hangs there? See how it embraces the end of the name? See how its usage does indeed suggest that care has been taken, thought given? This specific use of the comma, one that accompanies a carefully chosen salutation (in this case “Dear” meaning loved one, one who is close to the heart), should clearly be taken as a sign of glad-tidings, and also as a reason to pause, to take a breath of expectation before proceeding to the following line.

The Death of a Pronoun

The word whom is going the way of the dodo.

From a piece in the Atlantic...

Whom, I am thrilled to inform you, is dying. But its death, I am less thrilled to inform you, has been slow. According to Google’s expansive collection of digitized books, the word has been on a steady decline since 1826. The 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English records a similar slump. Articles in Time magazine included 3,352 instances of whom in the 1930s, 1,492 in the 1990s, and 902 in the 2000s. And the lapse hasn’t been limited to literature or journalism. In 1984, after all, the Ghostbusters weren’t wondering, “Whom you gonna call?”

Whom, in other words, is doomed. As Mignon Fogarty, the host of the popular Grammar Girl podcast, told me: “I’d put my money on whom being mostly gone in 50 to 100 years.”

But why? One explanation is that the word has outlived its ability to fulfill the most important function of language: to clarify and specify.

If Strunk and White Titled Some Famous Novels

Giggle.

A Guide to the Meaning and Usefulness of Punctuation Marks

Some literary humor, care of McSweeney's.

From the piece...

Ampersand. Great for loud parties on the beach. Use often, especially if you are under 47 and intend to kick that crippling cocaine habit. Does not grant wishes. Looks best in lipstick and serif fonts.


Question mark. Do not, under any circumstances, question Mark. Mark doesn’t know anything.


Apostrophe. A broken, poetic mark which bears the scars of the time it allegedly spent in Vietnam. Be careful with it. Useful, however, in unsent letters and medical prescriptions.


Ellipsis. Defective, oval punctuation mark, sometimes mistakenly tripled by idiots. Usually appears to mark out oral sex scenes involving psychiatrists. Also, occasionally, in epic space operas. Do not get this as a tattoo.


The Republic of Chiie

The world's worst typos, care of the Guardian.

13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using

The list, care of Mental Floss.

Writers' Favorite Punctuation Marks

The Atlantic rounds up some authors to wax poetic about semi-colons, em-dashes and the like, here.

Mysteries of Vernacular

Mysteries of Vernacular: Pants from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.

The History of the @ Symbol

Once a rarely used key on the typewriter, the graceful character has become the very symbol of modern electronic communication.

From a story in Smithsonian...

The origin of the symbol itself, one of the most graceful characters on the keyboard, is something of a mystery. One theory is that medieval monks, looking for shortcuts while copying manuscripts, converted the Latin word for “toward”—ad—to “a” with the back part of the “d” as a tail. Or it came from the French word for “at”—à—and scribes, striving for efficiency, swept the nib of the pen around the top and side. Or the symbol evolved from an abbreviation of “each at”—the “a” being encased by an “e.” The first documented use was in 1536, in a letter by Francesco Lapi, a Florentine merchant, who used @ to denote units of wine called amphorae, which were shipped in large clay jars.

The symbol later took on a historic role in commerce. Merchants have long used it to signify “at the rate of”—as in “12 widgets @ $1.” (That the total is $12, not $1, speaks to the symbol’s pivotal importance.) Still, the machine age was not so kind to @. The first typewriters, built in the mid-1800s, didn’t include @. Likewise, @ was not among the symbolic array of the earliest punch-card tabulating systems (first used in collecting and processing the 1890 U.S. census), which were precursors to computer programming.

The symbol’s modern obscurity ended in 1971, when a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson was facing a vexing problem: how to connect people who programmed computers with one another.

Auto Crrect Ths!

James Gleick laments it for the New York Times.

From the piece...

I MENTION a certain writer in an e-mail, and the reply comes back: “Comcast McCarthy??? Phoner novelist???” Did I really type “Comcast”? No. The great god Autocorrect has struck again.

It is an impish god. I try retyping the name on a different device. This time the letters reshuffle themselves into “Format McCarthy.” Welcome to the club, Format. Meet the Danish astronomer Touchpad Brahe and the Franco-American actress Natalie Portmanteau. 

In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.

What of the Exclamation Point?!

Smithsonian Magazine examines its history.

From the piece...


But where did the exclamation point come from? Any why  does it seem to be creeping into everything we do?

Turns out, no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point.

But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.”

Cliche Finder

There's a program you can use that detects cliches and overused words in your text. Find out about SmartWrite, here.

How Well Do You Know Your Punctuation Marks?

Find out, here.

Words Are Dying. Why?

Spell check.

From a story on Hot Word...

A group of physicists recently collaborated on a statistical survey of words. You may be wondering why physicists are interested in language. In this case, it is not language per se, but how words imitate the statistical patterns of the stock market and animal populations. This group of researchers, led by Alexander Petersen of the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, culled data from Google’s digitized books to analyze how word use varies over time.

In particular, the scientists looked at “word competition.” Why would words compete? Well, this isn’t about competition between words. Obviously, for language as a whole to function, nouns need verbs, which need prepositions and adverbs. In this sense, competition refers to aggression between different variations of a word: is “color” used more than “colour”? It may be hard to imagine this, but before spell-check there were often misspelled words in newspapers and published books. As the researchers point out: “With the advent of spell-checkers in the digital era, the fitness of a ‘correctly’ spelled word is now larger than the fitness of related ‘incorrectly’ spelled words.”