* Void where prohibited. Today is National Grammar Day, celebrated annually on March 4th because it’s a day that’s a complete sentence—“march forth”—if you believe that “fourth�...
These 15 laws of English usage are all you need to know... BARON’S FIRST LAW, OR, THE LAW OF DON’T TREAD ON ME: Everyone wants to be correct, but nobody wants to be corrected. It’s a free...
In March, 2023, Barney Bishop, who chairs the board of Florida’s Tallahassee Classical School, told an interviewer, “We don’t use pronouns.” The far right has declared war on pronouns, ...
No, but many conservatives think it does. In April, 2022, a Wisconsin school district opened a federal Title IX sexual harassment investigation into three middle school boys for refusing to use...
On April 18, 2022, Judge Kathryn Kimbell Mizelle, a Trump appointee to the Florida District Court, struck down the Centers for Disease Control’s “mask mandate,” designed to minimize the spr...
Hoping to strike a blow for heteronormativity, in a party-line vote in March the Florida House and Senate passed a controversial “Don’t say gay” bill. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law o...
Microsoft has added a diversity checker to its Office 365 spelling and grammar tool. If you check the appropriate boxes in its drop-down menu, Word will scan your writing for age and cultural bia...
The French are blaming American “wokisme” for their new nonbinary pronoun, iel, recently recognized by the authoritative dictionary, Le Petit Robert, in its online edition. The French frequen...
Conservative jurists claim to focus on the text and nothing but the text as they seek to discover the original public meaning of the Second Amendment. But it’s not clear that the amendment ever...
Conservatives are attacking what they call “cancel culture” for violating their First Amendment right to free speech, so much so that the theme for the ultra-conservative CPAC conference in O...
March 4th is National #GrammarDay, a day that’s a complete sentence. Except it’s not. March 4th, or March fourth, if you must, is a noun phrase. It’s only a sentence if you don’t take it ...
The defense in Donald Trump’s second impeachment rested in large part on the assertion that his fiery words to protestors on January 6 were protected by the First Amendment. Republican senators...
In 2018, Ana Suda and Martha Hernandez were detained in Havre, Montana, by a Customs and Border Protection agent for speaking Spanish while buying groceries at a gas station convenience store. Bo...
Last week Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delivered a politically-charged speech to the conservative Federalist Society. He denounced same-sex marriage, bemoaned the loss of religious freedom ...
According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans have heard something about gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, and one in five adults knows someone who uses such pronouns. As these pronou...
The Nineteenth Amendment reads, The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. It was ratified 10...
You know that gender pronouns like hie and zie are a thing when they start showing up in TV dramas. If you haven’t noticed them, never fear, for I, your professor of pronouns, will now enlighte...
On January 7, 1912, a headline in the Chicago Tribune breathlessly announced, “Mrs. Ella Young Invents Pronoun . . . Makes Principals Gasp.” Ella Flagg Young, Superintendent of Chicago’s pu...
In 1765, Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve invented two genderless third-person pronouns, lo (singular) and zo (plural), for an artificial language that he called Langue nouvelle, or ‘new language....
By a vote of 6-3 in Bostock v. Clayton County, on June 15, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII.�...
With millions around the world getting sick and dying from a pandemic virus, the French Academy wants you to know that the virus is feminine: la covid 19, not le covid 19. Young and old, previou...
Nonbinary singular they has become so normal that people now want to know the rules for how to use it. Which is right, they is or they are? Is the reflexive themself or themselves? Even if your a...
National Grammar Day is March 4 because it’s the only day of the year that’s a complete sentence. It’s a command, March forth, right? Verb plus adverb, if you’re being pedantic. Excep...
In 1971, Casey Miller and Kate Swift coined the gender-neutral pronouns tey, ter, and tem. Writing in the preview issue of Ms. Magazine, Miller and Swift called their creation “the human pronou...
Now that we keyboard everything from novels to shopping lists and texting on our phones has become the main way to reach out and touch someone, the digital age has stirred a nostalgia for the goo...