Good Friend Graduates!
Congratulations, Dustin!
Usage Determines Meaning no. 15
Sidney Landau, lexicographer, has a firm handle on one of my favorite near-inspired dictums, "Usage determines meaning." He devotes some space in his book Dictionaries to covering the history of English usage disputes. In the 18th century, grammar "errors" provoked moral outrage and an explosion of books offering corrections! I found this little anecdote about Goold Brown, author of The Grammar of English Grammars (!, 1851), quite amusing: Brown cites innumerable examples of actual "incorrect"...
COLLISION – 13 min VIMEO Exclusive Sneak Peak on Vimeo
Doug Wilson, Reformed apologist vs. Christopher Hitchens, eloquent atheist. Check out the first 13 minutes of their new documentary, Collision, here.
Kindle DX
We were waiting for the announcement, and now it's here: the Kindle DX. It appears to be no different from the Kindle 2 I have—except for a bigger screen, bigger storage, and a bigger price. That's 9.7" vs. 6"; 4GB vs. 2 GB; and $489 vs. $359. (The DX, targeting business consumers, can also read PDFs natively—that is a big plus.) I won’t be going for one now, but I imagine that I will upgrade my screen size in several years. In fact, I like the Kindle so much that I could see real benefits in...
Too Legit to Twit
I happened to catch a little bit of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion last Saturday evening, and he had trained his satirical sights on Twitter. Dusty the Cowboy was tweeting every last detail of his life, to hilarious effect. Unfortunately, the sketch is not online yet, but I did find this message from the Ketchup Advisory Board. Middle-aged Barb is having a conversation with her middle-aged husband, Jim, who can't seem to stop Tweeting during their talk: Barb: I’m not sure you’re...