Numerical literacy isn’t just about being able check your change from the cashier. It’s also about whether people are convicted of murder, as Clare Dyer writes today, the day that the disgraced Professor Sir Roy Meadow faces charges of professional misconduct.
There’s much to be vexed about over the Cannings/Meadow case. For me, it’s that a [...]
Mark Liberman writes:
According to eminent linguist and negative polarity expert John Lawler, *They don’t care less. is an ungrammatical sentence.
I am very excited that there’s someone walking around being a “negative polarity expert”. No doubt they could have made much use of him in Star Trek…
Scotty: The negative polarity rods can’t take any more, Mr [...]
Simon Waldman wrote an interesting piece on Saturday, though not too new if you’ve read his previous work. What was innovative was the medium — the op/ed pages of Saturday’s Guardian. But reading it, I could see the wrath of the blogosphere coming down on him.
The critical section was:
The world our Berliner will launch into [...]
I tried to find a snappy linguisitic term for this, but I couldn’t. Instead, here are three examples of what I’m calling separated phrases. Unfortunately I spotted all of these within 200 words of each other in a single article…
The Daily Mail in particular, I think she mentioned.
[...]
She develops a crush the size of a [...]
Today the Guardian reports on how German doctors are being recruited to make up shortfalls in the UK. In an interview with one German doctor looking to make the move, this made me choke on my coffee:
Dr Cordes, 39, who runs her own practice in Friedrichshain, in Berlin’s trendy, former communist east said: “We were [...]
I was shocked at how a Sun reporter was able to construct a “fake bomb” inside Sandhurst military academy, where Prince Harry is training. So I set about making my own fake bomb, to see if I could sneak it into my employers’ offices. And I could! It’s so easy. Here’s what it looked like:
I’m [...]
I asked some smart colleagues today about a current Jar problem I was having, and got a great response.
The problem: You have an application which depends on other Jars. You want my application and its dependencies to be rolled up into one convenient Jar. You can insert a Class-Path attribute in the rolled-up Jar’s manifest [...]
Because it’s a case study in how not to write a story, even though it’s just been republished in Japanese. And for the sake of this discussion, we’re going to disregard the racism of it.
The story reeks of something that’s been made up on the spot, as if a child had just asked us “tell [...]
At last he’ll be able to lead a normal life again.
Tags: michaeljackson
It says it’s a “project that explores the doom-and-gloom agenda of London’s Evening Standard headline writers”. Wonderful. See it all here.
Thanks to Lloyd for the tip.
Tags: eveningstandard, doom, gloom
