Friday, January 23, 2009

Press: The sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed - Slate

The sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed - By Kitty Burns Florey - Slate Magazine:

"In a few short weeks, Sarah Palin has produced enough poppycock to keep parsers and diagrammers busy for a long time. In the end, though, out of her mass of verbiage in the Sean Hannity interview, Palin did manage to emit a perfectly lucid diagram-ready statement that sums up, albeit modestly, not the state of the economy that she was (more or less) talking about but the quality of her thinking: [It certainly is a mess though.]"

Press: Oaf of Office - NYT

Op-Ed Contributor - Oaf of Office - NYTimes.com:

"In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions."

Press: No snickering - That road sign means something else - NYT


No Snickering - That Road Sign Means Something Else - NYTimes.com:

"In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire."