by Jamie Chavez | Dec 7, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
The apostrophe, that is. And what I’ve been seeing lately makes my eyes bleed, y’all. I know I’m not the first. (Here’s looking at you, Lynn Truss. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, but you need a copyeditor, too, friend.) Most recently, Kate Brannen wrote a...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 3, 2015 | Words & Language
Consider for a moment the effects of being asked to change the language you use. … Brian Friel’s play Translations, written in 1980, depicts this in an Irish setting. The action takes place in County Donegal in 1833: we follow a detachment of English soldiers who are...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 28, 2015 | The Writing Craft
I have just started Joseph Brodsky’s book On Grief and Reason. Let me say I have only read one essay in a collection of thirty, and I flipped through the book, sizing up the chapters, actually counting the pages, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—yes, this one’s good, it only has...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 15, 2015 | Words & Language
You know I’m endlessly fascinated by accents, regionalisms, and linguistic diversity in general. And every once in a while I find something that tickles my dialect interest. In “The Grammar Rules Behind 3 Commonly Disparaged Dialects,” linguist Arika Okrent (isn’t...
by Jamie Chavez | Jun 13, 2015 | Words & Language
By now you surely know I’m fascinated by the way people speak, how they use syntax and language. It’s almost inevitably a result of the location of our upbringing. And I was delighted when a friend pointed me to this article about code switching, which is the tendency...
