Word: grammars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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REMEMBER, back in grammar school or something, you went into New York on a Sixth Grade Field trip and you threw stuff around on the bus; you had to get dressed up because you were going into The City, and you had to be on your best behavior, so the bus stopped down there someplace and you got out and looked around and all the people around you were real mean-looking and not-particularly-dressed-up either and coming out of XXX Bookstores and lying in the gutter, so you went into the theater and saw this show with...
Jefferson's mistress, Kennedy's indiscretions, Nixon's contempt for the law-is there no end to the exposes about the failings of U.S. Presidents? Apparently not, for now we hear that George Washington was absolutely awful at spelling, grammar and punctuation. Some samples from his writing: "I passed the time . . . much more agree-abler than what I imagined I should" and "went ahunting . . . and catched a fox." Among his misspellings: expedate, ingaged, turkie, burrying and bairskin...
...question that can cause actual spasms is: "How is it going?" where "it" refers to the thesis. History and Lit majors--myself included--are like those kids in grammar school whose names begin with "A"--they must go first, but their anxiety ends earliest. Either they have already typed, bound, and submitted their masterworks or have by now been accepted somewhere--unless they decided long ago to cut a deal with the Department and give it up untried. But, as with the rest of that grammar school class, the bell will be tolling for other seniors at intervals the rest...
...difference between the right word and the almost right word," Mark Twain once observed, "is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Since Twain's day, in the view of many newspaper editors, a plague of fireflies has filled the sky: neologisms proliferate and the rules of grammar have raveled badly. To deal with the situation, the Associated Press and United Press International are preparing a new joint stylebook, and the New York Times has just issued a revised 231-page Manual of Style and Usage (Quadrangle; $10), though the last version appeared only 14 years...
...chief of the copy desk, Harriet Bachman. This month she decided to retire from policing abbreviations, hyphens, capitals, captions, etc., to tend to her antique collection and study Russian. In announcing Bachman's retirement, Managing Editor Henry Grunwald wrote: "We will miss her as the supreme arbiter of grammar and defender of TIME's English prose against many enemies, ranging from outright barbarism to simple negligence...