Valentine’s Day

Sunday is February 14, which is Valentine’s Day in the U.S. and many other countries. Valentine’s Day is not an official holiday, but it is a day which has  long been associated with love and romance. The origins of Valentine’s Day are not entirely clear, but this page has the most popular stories (or watch [...]

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Word of the day: procrastination

Procrastination means time wasting: you know, reading your favorite language blog when you should be writing your paper, for example … Here’s an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education with advice for procrastinators (you’ll need to be on a UNC computer to read it under the university’s subscription). Two comments under the article recommend [...]

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Why punctuation (still) matters

I know commas are annoying, but they are occasionally quite useful for clarifying meaning, and you don’t need to be a grammatical pedant to appreciate the difference. Here’s an amusing slip I saw on a travel website describing a new cruise ship (I can dream, right?!). The ship, the Celebrity Eclipse, will be based in [...]

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Newton … online!

I enjoyed reading this story about the online publication of William Stukeley’s Life of Newton. You can now read the entire book — including the famous description of the falling apple — on the Royal Society’s website. (The glorious 3D version appears to prefer Internet Explorer.) “It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, [...]

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What’s your favorite English word?

It’s pretty quiet in the Writing Center this week … silent, in fact! But I thought you might like to join me in a little linguistic experiment. I just told a German friend (via Facebook!) that my favorite German word used to be Kartoffel (potato) but is now Spargel (asparagus). It’s a long story. She [...]

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Santa Claus, astrophysics, and educational psychology

I had to share this fun story from National Public Radio’s Morning Edition today (12/11/09). Happy holidays, everyone!

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Foot in Mouth Award 2009

For those of you who need a break, enjoy the winner of this year’s Foot in Mouth Award, presented by Britain’s Plain English Campaign “for a baffling comment by a public figure.” You can see the past winners here, as well as this year’s Golden Bull Award winners.

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Why punctuation matters

I though you might enjoy this ad I saw in a recent Carolina Parenting magazine: The line break doesn’t help, but adding an apostrophe would have made this grammatically better … and much less amusing!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is coming very soon (November 26), and here are some links to prepare you for “turkey day” 2009: 1. The History Channel’s Thanksgiving site 2. Video introduction to Thanksgiving from history.com 3. The “textbook” story of the First Thanksgiving (Scholastic books) 4. Pictures of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City 5. [...]

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Happy Halloween!

This Saturday, October 31, is Halloween, a popular celebration in the United States and a small number of other countries. You can read about the long history of this holiday here, and find out about Chapel Hill’s Homegrown Halloween. Please note the street closures, parking restrictions, and changes to the bus routes. Many Americans celebrate [...]

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