On our way back from a recent trip to L.A., my friends and I decided to make a pit stop a few dozen miles past Bakersfield. (I think we wanted to avoid the commotion that is the Bakersfield In-N-Out.) So around 2 p.m., we walked into a Taco Bell, one Read More…
It ought to be no surprise that I, a self-admitted grammar nerd, correct people’s verbal slip-ups — incorrect prepositions, past participles and the like. What really gets me, though, is when there is a mistake that I cannot address right away, often because it is written. After all, to whom Read More…
I have a great deal of respect for many of those who serve our country in uniform, but I have nothing but contempt for the talentless individuals who write their advertisements, which evince little other than a failure to comprehend the usage of basic parts of speech: As any grade-school Read More…
Ever since I began as a copy editor at the Daily Cal, I’ve had a conflicted relationship with the Oxford comma. It has always made sense to me to separate every term in a series; otherwise, how would the reader know the last didn’t have to do with the previous? Read More…
For a while now, I’ve had a strange fascination with the graffiti messages people write. Some are blatantly comical to the point of ridiculousness, while others are angsty confessions of unrequited love or hopeless questions of identity. Occasionally, I stumble upon nuggets of wisdom: It’s an inspiring statement. It’s genuinely Read More…
Vishalli Loomba, our esteemed ASUC president, sent out a campuswide email recently and signed it like this: With ASUC elections coming up, we’d better hope that the next leader of our student government can spell his or her own title correctly!
Here’s a funny news clip posted a few weeks ago about Rick Santorum. Time will tell if the headline writer should get a job as a fortune teller.
Quick background: There’s a programming language is called Lisp. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp made in the ’70s. When you type something into Scheme that causes an error, it might say “error: no argument” or something like that. Well, that’s what it should do…as in: Although, instead it might Read More…
OK, I’ve given The Washington Post a month to correct this error, obsessively tracking this page (clearly, I have too much time on my hands). They still haven’t fixed it, so I reserve the right to be snarky about it. Subject-verb agreement is one of those basic grammatical tenets of Read More…
Now, I’m sure a lot of us have wondered, at some point, why words with an ‘F’ sound are spelled with a ‘ph’ instead. I suppose it wouldn’t be unreasonable for an uninformed individual to use an ‘F’ where there should be a ‘P’ and an ‘H’ in its place, Read More…
