There are some issues people won't shut up about that aren't important. There are some issues people won't shut up about that are important. And then there's this heated issue, which falls squarely in the middle.
You may have been thinking the fact that you were laid off recently gave you a pretty good excuse to sleep in a little bit late, occasionally spend the mornings in your pajamas, and maybe even go an entire day without showering. How wrong you were! As the Wall Street Journal's Christina Binkley explains it, you'll need to get up earlier, dress better, and possibly take remedial English classes, too:
A tipster sends us this photo of an actual advertisement in Sweden, which, she explains, is a result of the stubborn Swedes' tendency to believe their fancy schools actually teach them proper English. Psht:
The Semicolon died this week at the age of 417 from complications of irrelevancy and misuse. Semicolon was born in England in 1591 to Ben Jonson, the first notable writer to use them "systematically." The mark of punctuation dedicated its career to connecting independent clauses and indicating a closer relationship between the clauses than a period does. But mostly it just confused the shit out of English students everywhere.
The Wall Street Journal's lifestyle magazine, Pursuits, has a brand-new name! It will be called: WSJ. Note the period... the period is part of the name. OK? WSJ (period). Wow, that's even more annoying than Yahoo! or OK! "Its understatedness suits the personality of the Journal and avoids the pretense and artifice of many bad magazine names," says a WSJ(.) spokesperson. "The three letters happen to be typographically quite pleasing." Not as pleasing as WTF! (We think the period stands for Rupert Murdoch symbolically putting his foot down: "No, srsly, guys, I am in charge now. PERIOD.") [WWD]
The Times was sooo thrilled to find a vaguely correct use of a semicolon on a subway ad that they tracked down the copywriter (who has a degree in creative writing, natch) and wrote a whole cutesy piece about how rare it is that civilians punctuate properly. Then they asked various famous linguists and grammarians to comment:
Ed2010 is the "group for young editors who are hoping to reach their dream magazine jobs by the year 2010" (with the presupposition that one's dream magazine job must be at a mind-numbing women's book), and things have been getting hot and heavy on its bulletin boards lately. A perhaps unprecedented number of replies have been prompted by a troubled inquiry posted Friday night:
An article American Journalism Review indulges the world of OCD editors by surveying a group of writers for the strangest anal inanities they've encountered:
We suspect that's at least a bit of a misquote.
Who knew skipping Freshman Comp could stand in the way of finding true love?
Today's Post has an exclusive that is uncharacteristically both actually exclusive and, even better, actually true: Someone gave the paper a tape filled with about 45 minutes of secretly recorded conversations among Gov. Pataki, his wife, Al D'Amato, and some top political advisors. There's lots of stuff about patronage appointments, lots of Libby Pataki bitching about her schedule of events and the fact Donna Hanover Giuliani got more attention at those events than she did, and, finally, what to us is clearly the most scandalous bit, from a conversation between D'Amato and a Pataki aide about a patronage job:
One unhappy reader caught this promo for NBC's new Inconceivable, a primetime drama coming in the fall about doctors — sexy doctors, natch — working in a fertility clinic.
