Even the New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, has lost the ability to get the who/whom distinction right. Here’s a sentence from an article in today’s Sunday Book Review section:
Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual [...]
The Welsh-language text in the sign above reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”
Huh?
Well, you can probably guess what happened:
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said [...]
Dear Costco Coulter,
If you’re going to claim on your biography page that you “speak Arabic,” you might want to think about getting the most basic Arabic phrases right.
There’s no such thing as “Alhamdillullah.” This is a mistake you’ve made many, many times. We’ve even talked about it before.
The phrase is al-hamdu lillah. [...]
The worst sample of written English ever, courtesy of K-Lo at The Corner [emphasis mine]:
McCain may not rally a crowd, but there’s there there that could plausibly be commander-in-chief of a nation at war (really, we are, remember? It’s not just over there.).
Has anyone ever produced a worse sentence while attempting to write English?
Are you familiar with the expression the year dot, readers? I ran across it in a Nation column by Katha Pollitt:
[I]f you have to explain your decisions on your website, you’re already in trouble. Because that invites the rejected advertiser to critique your editorial content going back to the year dot…
Was that a typo, [...]
Today the Costco Coulter has posted some “good and bad news” about the surge in popularity of Arabic as a foreign-language choice for American college students. She claims to have taken Arabic when she was in college (she doesn’t seem to have learned much, as we have noted in the past, but that’s another [...]
The term “Nazi,” as a result of constant misuse, is starting to lose its meaning. It’s drifting semantically towards “something I consider oppressive and disagreeable.” See Glenn Greenwald’s post from yesterday and Dave Neiwert’s post from today on this topic.
Greenwald points out that it used to be considered a pretty bad thing to [...]
Yes, it’s that simple, readers. A five-year-old could understand it:
The Arabic word allah means “God.” Just as the French word dieu means “God” and the Spanish word dios means “God.”
We’ve been over this before. Even wingnutty scaremonger Daniel Pipes has no problem admitting it.
Alas, there will always be Know-Nothings like Crazy Pammy, [...]
Debbie Schlussel, the Costco Coulter, claims to “speak” four languages, including Arabic. She has unwittingly revealed that to be a lie, unfortunately for her, with a grotesque linguistic blunder that any Arabic 101 student would know better than to make. Look at this:
Of course, even that was a sanitized version of what happens [...]
Who are the two dumbest people on the intertrons, readers? I think they might be Crazy Pammy and Mark Steyn. Here’s what happened when the two of them hooked up for an interview: Mark Steyn displayed quite a deep grasp of sociolinguistics.
Yes, on the face of it yes Arabic is a language [...]
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