John Gordon Ross

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I made the idle comment to a friend that November 23rd was National Freelancers Day in the UK. After a couple of minutes of him rolling his eyes and twitching his mouth as he tried to get his head around the concept, he said, “They’ll all get the day off, then, I suppose?”
In fact, [...]

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The Google Translator Toolkit is handy for small-scale stuff like blog posts, or at least I find it so. Here is a video presentation:

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The Internet’s most prominent prescriptivist, John McIntyre, has been elbowed out of his position presiding the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun. I might be imagining things, but his last post at his blog You Don’t Say was actually put up by a colleague, which smacks to me of “you’ve got ten minutes to clear [...]

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I think this proves once again that no amount of endeavour is as creatively fruitful as plain old getting it wrong. I found it on a forum, posted by someone from an Eastern European capital, who was evidently trying to say to another poster, “You’re wrong.” But isn’t that “You are not true” (the original [...]

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Found via Grammar Blog and You Don’t Say, among other sources:

And if you enjoyed that, you’ll like this:

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Seems like it is whenever I have most things to do that I find seriously fun things to distract me. Nothing new about that, it happens to all freelancers. But just at the moment, I have toothache and laughing is quite painful. And a Language Hat post has introduced me to Speculative Grammarian, “the premier [...]

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Punctuation purists led by John Richards, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, are up in arms over Birmingham City Council’s decision to omit apostrophes from street signs. Reactions have run from the usual indignation to outright horror. Apostrophe Abuse ironizes about it cleverly, calling Birmingham “the city where apostrophes arent welcome,” while Apostrophe Catastrophes goes [...]

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