Joel Stickley’s blog How to Write Badly Well. Each entry is in the form of a paragraph or verse illustrating that kind of bad writing. As you laugh over entries like “Change sentence structure for the benefit of your rhyme scheme” and “Describe every character in minute detail, taking no account of narrative pacing”, you can also think about how this blog’s title shows once more that adverbs don’t just modify individual words; they can modify phrases. If they could only modify words, then write badly well would just be nonsense, but when you take well to modify the phrase write badly, the resulting semantics perfectly matches what Stickley does in this blog. (Hat tip to Laurie Abkemeier.)
Ben H. Winters, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies writes at Visual Thesaurus about how he learned the plural of octopus was not what he thought it was. My favorite line: “I could not have been more surprised if my inbox had contained an actual octopus.”
Hey, I know that linguist! An article at PhysOrg.com tells about how fellow Ohio State alum Amanda Miller figured out a better way to measure and describe the phonetics of clicks. Hey, did you notice how I cleverly used alum? I couldn’t call her a fellow alumnus, or a fellow alumna, and certainly not a fellow alumni or alumnae, but the clipped form alum is vague enough to cover us both. And I know nobody will think I’m talking about KAl(SO4)2.12H2O, since I used an indefinite article before the word. (Hat tip to Adrian Morgan, the Flesh-Eating Dragon at The Outer Hoard.)
And now, the funniest introduction to Indo-European and Proto-Germanic sound changes you’re ever likely to watch, in three parts. (Hat tip to Mr. Verb, via Bradshaw of the Future.)
