This is funny. Who would have thought that a little apostrophe would mean the difference between proper Christianity and secular heathenry? Well, James McGrath would. He argues (satirically, of course) that using New Years Day (or, I presume, New Years’ Day) instead of New Year’s Day is a plot by pro-diversity punks to lend credence to non-Gregorian calendars. My favorite part is the line “Truly committed Christians should be listening carefully for the lack of apostrophe” — that’s brilliant. Now I can’t wait until people realize that Mothers Day is a ploy by lesbians to convince people that having two mommies is okay.
A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.
About Me
I'm Gabe Doyle, currently an assistant professor at San Diego State University, in the Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages, and a member of the Digital Humanities. Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. And before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.
My research and teaching connects language, the mind, and society (in fact, I teach a 500-level class with that title!). I use probabilistic models to understand how people learn, represent, and comprehend language. These models have helped us understand the ways that parents tailor their speech to their child's needs, why sports fans say more or less informative things while watching a game, and why people who disagree politically fight over the meaning of "we".
[…] wonderful deconstructionist constructionism, except to point to the source of the phrase (and to some delightful commentary from Motivated Grammar, which alerted me to the […]
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January 17, 2009 at 8:32 am
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong » Nobody expects the Spanish anapostrophism!
[…] wonderful deconstructionist constructionism, except to point to the source of the phrase (and to some delightful commentary from Motivated Grammar, which alerted me to the […]