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What is "uniquely American" about the word apple? Both the word and fruit come from elsewhere and still abound in those places: the word came into use in English over a thousand ye…

This doesn't quite hit the mark. The example given in Klisp will work with an arbitrary number of arguments. What looks to be the second of two named arguments, e, is actually the …

There are plenty of English compounds that don't fit that description: forthright, downright, forthcoming; wisecrack (but "wise woman"); blackboard, greenback, greengrocer, yellowb…

Apathy and disagreement are different things. So are extrapolation and confirmation. No one is in a position to "confirm" this statement or prove it irrecusably wrong. More or less…

Phonetic alphabets have strong precedents - and have had strong backers - in English as well. See the Shavian alphabet[1] for a relatively recent example. Others were drawn up by s…

Which is why I wrote 'apparently.' This is an interview with NPR, not an academic paper. You may as well question whether the correlation exists at all as hone in on this one point…

This is addressed at length - and quite early on - in the article. The correlation stands, apparently.

What use do you want us to make of that comment? Be upfront if you actually have something to say. Do you mean that Austria has only just changed its official position, relative to…

I'm not sure how this would pose a problem. I'm not the parent commenter, but I don't typically go to Google to search for sites I frequent. It would be such an odd thing to do—gra…

"E.E. Cummings" is fine. It's what he used.[0] On the top of Cummings, I have occasionally felt like I was faced with an incomplete set of instructions when reading certain of his …

J is in fact a much more recent invention than many of us would suppose[0]. It is worth adding, however, that it would not have saved G, except in English; our pronunciation of J, …

It is a true if disingenuously narrow-sighted description of the origins of vi as a visual interface to ex , a regex-based line-editor and descendant of ed. Even the ascetic ed, ho…

Hard wrapping may be an elegant solution on the runtime configuration side, but it is frequently to blame for inelegance when editing. Hard-wrapped text must be manually reformatte…

Zaner-Bloser, to my knowledge, is not so far off from Palmer except in its prescribed teaching style, as carried out over multiple years in a child's schooling. The final product, …

Please don't assume my ignorance on other hands, or that I would argue in favor of teaching students the Palmer method. Teaching children outmoded systems ill suited to the instrum…

It is most telling, to me, to hear people (none of them made from straw) admit that writer's cramp is part and parcel of a single session of taking notes or writing an hour-long ex…

This is the 1999 I remember as well, with the addition of visual clutter (see present-day excite.com for a reminder), JavaScript everywhere (DHTML, not AJAX), and pop-up and pop-un…

I agree with you. My experience with remote work has been touch-and-go, but it always helps when team members are mutually willing to communicate over the phone. Effective back-and…

If I ever listened to horror stories like these, there wouldn't be an airline left I would fly with. This is textbook; replace United with Delta, Southwest, Air Canada, etc., at wi…

It does feature satirical articles and columns, including the Borowitz Report, of which that Scalia article is one installment. (One of its most famous regulars was James Thurber, …