decorabilia

Northwest author Emily Lockhart came to Capital Friday afternoon, sharing her experiences with six English classes. In a presentation that w...

Why is your teacher encouraging, exhorting, or even nagging you to learn roots, to study vocab, and to read with an eye and ear for language...

1. Care about your writing. Everything that follows depends on this. Care so hard it hurts. In fact, if you are not in physical pain every ...

Every time I tell a stranger my primary occupation, they say a version of the following: "Oh, I guess I'll have to watch what I say...

There's a neurological explanation for why people love to verb nouns. When people were confronted with verbed nouns (in sentences such...

A creativity / storytelling / extemporaneous speaking exercise. Take your class on a tour of your school. The catch: they're the tour g...

The concretion, found in Oregon, offers a potential glimpse into a world millions of years in the past, but the story offers an equally fasc...

... don't just use "crikey"--spell it wrong. (The clouds, incidentally, are nifty.)

;) or :) at the end of a sentence: which should I use, and how often? First, you should use emoticons, as they are called, as liberally as p...

Apropos of being in Alabama for one more day... It starts with a discussion of the vagaries of standard English usage. It evolves into a tho...

Clark Stooksbury on the natural history of the greatest television show of all time: Speaking at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, the actor Pa...

The mess in the apartment is contained and certified non-toxic. The mess on my hard drive, in my Google Docs, and in my Firefox bookmarks, ...

You are allowed only one neo- per noun. [via Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing ]

Here's a game: take two words that represent good things individually, and combine them into a common phrase that is bad--or, at best, d...

Put that modifier in the proper place. Or else: After the flub heard around the world, President Barack Obama has taken the oath of office...

Slate's Juliet Lapidos points out that antimetabole, right now, is hot: John McCain, in his Thursday convention address, deployed the t...

Slate's Paul Collins dissects one of John McCain's preferred rhetorical devices: "my friends." McCain falls neatly into l...

Laughing at others' syntactic and orthographic ineptness is one thing. Making it your mission to correct others' mistakes: not so w...

1. Sucks to misspell your own name. Suck doubly if you're a newspaper, and infinitely if you blow it on the front page . It's one ...

One more linguistic entry for today: Ron Rosenbaum wants to know which catchphrases have been completely cliched out. There's Stage 1, ...