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…
Usually, I can easily understand the source of a common error: Some people say “irregardless” because they fail to realize the suffix “-less” does the work of the here-inappropriate prefix “ir-”; others confuse “affect” and “effect” due to the relative similarity of their meanings and usage. In the case of Read More…
I solved a very strange mystery recently, but intrigue remains. The other day, I captioned a photo that we published with an article on Daniel Dewitt’s postponed trial in print. It read, “At the court proceedings, which took place at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse, the trial was delayed for Read More…
… and awful misspellings. It’s true: No one is infallible. According to the Washington Post, a release was published stating Joe Biden’s campaigning plans for this week, including a trip to Rhode Island, which the White House mistakenly spelled “R-O-A-D.” The White House corrected the gaffe in a later version. Read More…
