From extracts of official CIA documents that the agency cited in a report asking officers to use clearer and more concise language. The report was released in November. In view…
The only letter I’ve ever sent to the New York Times was in the 1980s, objecting to the paper’s suddenly pestilent use of “draconian.” During Iran–Contra the complaint must have…
Regarding the purported rules of English syntax, we tend to divide into mutually hostile camps. Hip, open-minded types relish the never-ending transformations of the way we speak and write. They…
From a post on Object Dreams, a Tumblr blog. The post is a rewriting of The Elements of Style using predictive text, a program that assists typing by anticipating which…
From a list of slang terms used by British students to describe drunkenness or the effects of drugs, included by Tony Thorne in the fourth edition of the Dictionary of…
From the CIA’s 2011 style guide, recently acquired by the National Security Counselors, a legal nonprofit, following a Freedom of Information Act request.
By Suki Kim, from notes she took during teacherorientation sessions at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, included in her book, Without You, There Is No Us, out next…
From forty-nine citations that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to the book Meanderings of Memory, by an author known only as Nightlark, believed to have been published in 1852. In…