American English Doctor

Synonyms can be revealing

Maeve Maddox — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:23:36 +0000

A relay baton is a symbol of teamwork and cooperation; a cudgel is a weapon for beating people into submission. [...]

Worse errors than hopefully

Maeve Maddox — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:25:25 +0000

Cyberspace is a-buzz with reactions to the recently announced decision by the Associated Press Stylebook editors to accept the “modern usage of hopefully.”

Although many speakers welcome the decision, others see it as another nail in the coffin of grammatical correctness in American speech.

I read about the AP decision in an article by Monica Hesse of [...]

Happy 448th Birthday Shakespeare!

Maeve Maddox — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:09:46 +0000

Conspiracy theories are meat and drink to a public that mistrusts just about everything, especially any form of learning that cannot be demonstrated to lead to “a good [...]

What People Don’t Know Anymore

Maeve Maddox — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:27:03 +0000

Watching the quiz show Jeopardy is a good way to track the shift in general knowledge that is taking place in our [...]

Lesson about Reading from a Prison Inmate

Maeve Maddox — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:47:34 +0000

Reading among free citizens in this country has become so out of favor that when Judy Schoonover of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas was forced by illness to put her bookstore up for sale, she couldn’t find a buyer. With the clock running out, she placed an ad on Craigslist offering her inventory of 30,000 books [...]

Mobile Devices and Spelling

Maeve Maddox — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:43:34 +0000

Just a few days after the recent school shooting in Ohio, someone at a school in Georgia reported a shooting threat that caused that school to be locked down for several hours.

Here’s the threat as it was reported to the authorities:

Gunman be at west hall today.

Here’s the message typed by the sender:

Gunna be at west [...]

How do you pronounce Dawn?!

Maeve Maddox — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:22:21 +0000

Today on Jeopardy there was a category on homophones, words that sound alike, but have different meanings.

Here’s the clue that threw me:

a homophone that can mean either a high-ranking member of a Mafia family, or the rising of the sun.

No wonder I missed that one. In the dialect of standard English that I speak, the [...]

Technology versus Literacy

Maeve Maddox — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:08:00 +0000

The barbarians are not at the gates. They are inside the gates — and have academic tenure…What has failed is accepted without question by so-called ‘thinking people’ and what worked is disdained as being out of touch with the times. – Thomas Sowell

I read a jaw-dropping essay in my local paper the other day. It was [...]

Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens!

Maeve Maddox — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:44:21 +0000

Charles Dickens, born February 7, 1812

Born this day in 1812, Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870, having producing dozens of novels and short works, many of which are still read today.

Here’s a list of his works at Every Author.

Great Expectations is the novel now taught ad nauseum in the schools, but the book [...]

It’s Not Smart to be Smart in America

Maeve Maddox — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:32:22 +0000

With the emphasis on test scores in something called "literacy," literature and the habits of mind it fosters have become casualties of bureaucracy. [...]