Nonsense Verse

A Century of Bugaboos

Language may change, but pedantry is forever. And as Jan Freeman demonstrates in Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, so too is the tradition of modern-day pedants’ picking apart the outmoded irritants of the quibblers who came before them. Here's the full blog post.

Style and Alchemy

My review of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, for The New York Times Book Review.

The Copy Editors' Survival Guide

The Subversive Copy Editor. What a title! It brings to mind all sorts of wickedness, does it not? The rogue editor inserting illicit language, or botching grammar, or wittingly misplacing punctuation out of spite toward some demon writer. But it’s not what you think. Read the full blog post.

Words, Glorious Words

A blog post about Foyle’s Philavery, a book featuring hundreds of examples of “overlooked gems” in the English language — selections obscure, euphonious and quirky, including one of my favorites: crapulence.