Category: Writing and Language

Bar brawls are only fun in TV, movies, or D&D games. Here are some potential tactics to use if you find yourself confronted by some guy wanting to make a little (or a lot of) trouble, here are some ways to avoid violence.

(Executive summary: you can try and save face, or you can try and save your face.)

Originally shared by +Lifehacker:

These smooth-talking tips will make sure everyone has a good time.

I’ve Worked Bar Security, Here’s How to Talk Your Way Out of a Bar Fight
Sun Tzu once said “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” And that goes double when the drinks are flowing. People can get a bit hot-headed when they’re on the sauce, and in some cases, physical. Based on my experiences as a security guard, these smooth talking tips will help you calm an intense situation and escape a potential beating.

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The city of Lone Tree, the Colorado Department of Transportation, and the people behind the RidgeGate development in Lone Tree, can't quite decide how to spell the parkway that runs through the area. As a result, there are a whole bunch of signs that will, eventually, need to be replaced …

Driving You Crazy: How do you spell RidgeGate Parkway — Ridge Gate? Ridgegate? Or RidgeGate?
How do you spell Ridgegate? Some signs say Ridge Gate. Some say Ridgegate. Others say RidgeGate.RidgeGate. What is the correct way?”

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The French are known for being … um … determined to intentionally maintain the purity of their tongue, to officially deprecate word imports in favor of their own native words, etc.

But that sort of sentiment can draw flak when the government officially makes changes to the language.

'French linguistic purists have voiced online anger at the removal from many words of one of their favourite accents – the pointy little circumflex hat (ˆ) that sits on top of certain vowels. Changes to around 2,400 French words to simplify them for schoolchildren, such as allowing the word for onion to be spelled ognon as well as the traditional oignon, have brought accusations the country’s Socialist government is dumbing down the language.'

But it's not those zany Socialists this time. These changes were all proposed and approved by the language police, the Académie Française, decades ago.

Language always changes. For all that people here get irked when that change is messy and pop-culture-driven, that may be a less objectionable way than to have the government pass on the dictates of the language police.

Not the oignon: fury as France changes 2,000 spellings and drops some accents
#JeSuisCirconflexe campaigners fight back against decision by the Académie Française to ‘fix anomalies’ – although decision was originally made in 1990

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Well, sure one can, but I tend to err on the side of "the more, the merrier."

Of course, one of my former bosses referred to me as "Too Many Commas Man".

A Comma Problem among Editors | Copyediting.com
I like commas, perhaps a little too much. I like the way they give me more control over readers’ pacing, forcing them mentally to pause when I want them to pause and go when I want them to go. I like how they can break a sentence into discrete chunks while showing how those chunks relate to one …

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Okay, I confess, over this last year I've started using "they" as an indefinitely-gendered singular pronoun (e.g., "A student entered the room, went the front, and handed the professor their term paper.") I'd have preferred an actual word be invented for the role, but that's never gotten any serious traction, and it strikes me as better than:

(a) rewriting everything to avoid an indefinitely gendered pronoun (altering sentence structure based on unknown or neutral gender strikes me as too great a contortion)

(b) using a gendered pronoun ("him") for indefinitely gendered individuals (certainly as contrafactual a usage as using a plural pronoun for a singular)

(c) using "she/he" or "s/he" or "he or she" or similar chimera (clumsy, bureaucratic, and ugly)

I've been using a combination of (a) and (c) for many years, but it just feels too awkward now to continue. For formal business writing — well, I may wait for the style guides to more fully catch up. But for things less than that, well, language and grammar are always evolving, and, as no less than William Safire noted with dictionaries, "when enough of us are wrong, we're right."

Witnessing a Rule Change: Singular ‘They’ – Lingua Franca – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education
I have a new favorite mug. It was given to me by the graduate students in the Joint Program in English and Education (JPEE) and celebrates my advocacy of singular they—with the explanatory footnote. But when can we stop including the footnote? We got one step closer two weeks ago, …

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Another nice infographic, breaking down the world's languages in various ways. Very cool.

A World of Languages
There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 2…

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