As an English major, I can honestly say that I give far too many fucks about grammar. The fastest way to screw up my day is to suddenly confront me with a misused "your," a misplaced apostrophe or, god forbid, a fucking comma splice. As that last sentence demonstrates, however, I do not give a single… Continue reading Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?
Category: English major
Re-Reading Books You Hated
I recently re-read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, after it was featured on this season of Crash Course: Literature. The first time I read the book, I was 12 years old, in middle school, doing the honor-student-athlete balancing act, and to say that I hated this book would be wildly unfair, because I did not, in… Continue reading Re-Reading Books You Hated
Liking Things That Aren’t Excellent
I've just finished reading Haunted by Chuck Palaniuk. It is the second novel of his that I've read (the first being Fight Club, which I have complained about before), and definitely my favorite of the two, as it has lead me to the conclusion that I quite like Chuck Palaniuk as a writer. His work isn't… Continue reading Liking Things That Aren’t Excellent
A Rant About Linguistic Pedantry
Hey guys, remember that time I got all up in the prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar debate? Yeah, it's time for more of that.One of my favorite channels on YouTube is the Mental Floss channel, which is narrated by John Green and regularly comes out with videos full of Top-whatever lists about history and science and… Continue reading A Rant About Linguistic Pedantry
Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar
It will probably not surprise anyone who reads this blog to learn that I am something of a grammar-phile. I have a small collection of dictionaries and grammar textbooks, and I like to read them for fun. Once, I read a biography of a grammar textbook (Stylized: a Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's… Continue reading Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar
M.M. Jordahl 