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March 2009 Archives

March 2, 2009

The thrill of the crossword

Watching Tyler Hinman win the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, yesterday, may not be as riveting as watching championship basketball, or even golf -- but the mood is definitely the same. 

The crucial clues were "Basic," 8 letters = Alkaline

and "Item in stocks," 4 letters = Bone

Blogger Eric Berlin has written a report of the finals that does make them seem riveting. How appropriate that a contest about words comes even more vividly alive in words than it does in pictures.


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March 1, 2009

Learning grammar from Billy Bob Thornton

I just discovered the rather hilarious site? blog? Celebrity English, which critiques the speech of the likes of Billy Bob, Angelina, and Jessica. It's much funnier for being absolutely deadpan:

Billy Bob has made an error in parallelism. His second sentence contains a list of items that are not all the same grammatical structure.

Dead-on, too, in its analyses of the celebrities' grammar. Even so, I would have preferred "are not all" in the sentence I just quoted to read "don't all have." (Since when are "items" "structure"?) 

The truth is, everyone needs an editor!

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