EconTech

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

I was curious about the history of the word lynch. Going to the most obvious source for such things first, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, I was highly disappointed by the definition:
trans. To condemn and punish by lynch law. In early use, implying chiefly the infliction of punishment such as whipping, tarring and feathering, or [...]

Are you? Yes, you likely are. Though you maybe union-ized or un-ionized or both. Just another reason for non-native speakers to hate English.

This subject has come up three times in the past two days, including a request to write a post on this. I don’t know why I am considered a grammatical authority, but as a slave to my reader(s), I write up a post.
The use of said comma will likely not lead to ambiguity whereas the [...]

DEA, not Dea. FBI not Fbi. HUD not Hud. Granted, we pronounce the letters of the first two, though they are not unpronounceable. But to me, an acronym is constituted as a series of the important words of a phrase or compound, proper noun. Downsizing the following letters places undue significance on the first letter, [...]

Since I know so many people who watch “The Wire” thought I’d help Mark over at Language Log out:

OK, you wireistas, listen up
Cosma Shalizi says “I’m pretty sure that some of the dialogue in The Wire uses ‘yo’ as, precisely, a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. Of course I’d have to re-watch the previous seasons to [...]

Well, it is not something that I can put in for ‘they’ in formal writing. But it is a start. Unfortunately, some outlets do not understand the difference between a gendered noun and a gendered individual. Also, where is this flurry? I missed it. And I won’t use “qua” again today. Promise.

Yo
There’s been a flurry [...]