When writing, it pays to be as clear and concise as possible. This sentence (from Alliant Energy’s “Monthly Natural Gas Update”) is neither:
A decatherm (equal to 10 therms) is enough natural gas to heat an average home for 4.5 days.
It’s not clear because I still don’t know what a “decatherm” is. The parenthetical [...]
Yesterday, as an example of how languages are constantly evolving, I taught my Writing & Grammar 9 students the origin of the English word “goodbye” (it started life as the phrase “God be with you” - just in case you didn’t know).
Now I read an article I’ll certainly be sharing with them tomorrow: according to [...]
If you’d as recently as yesterday pitched me a story told through diary entries about love between two citizens of a collectivist government set in the distant future - a future in which the very word “I” is no longer remembered - I would have naturally assumed you were talking about Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a [...]
Liberal, conservative, neocon, radical, progressive, red, pinko — what does it all mean? Callimachus breaks it down in his latest Carnival of the Etymologies.