Category: Usage

Damn these danglers to hell

How to identify a dangling modifier: Held at the Dupont Circle town house of Peter Bergen, the CNN terrorism expert, the party’s heavily mediacentric guest list included Michael Isikoff of Newsweek; a former Clinton mouthpiece, Joe Lockhart; the political blogger…

Why I hate pressure groups

Because of their idiotic insistence on their preferred terminology. From Clay’s post on the proper terminology on the gay-people-getting-married dustup. “Gay marriage” is a stupid thing to call it. Gay people can get married now. Just not to other gay…

OK, now I’ve officially had it …

… with “kinder, gentler.” Can we please toss this one out of the airlock, please? The vacuum of space would do it some good. The tipping-point passage: Toner notes that the candidates as a whole are appealing “to a far…

Death to redundancy

Clay rails against “future plans,” which reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to do: compile an exhaustive list of redundancies. Here’s one that bugs me immensely: “Different.” As in “Fourteen different choices present themselves…” With all redundancies, the rule…

Anti-anti

Nicole Stockdale points out changes to the curent AP Stylebook.