Dexter is the eponymous serial killer hero of the Showtime television series. The TV show – the first episode of the fifth season aired Sunday – is fraught with moral ambiguity, note the strange bedfellows “killer” and “hero” applied at one time to the leading character. The serial comma (SC), too, is fraught with ambiguity. […]
(We have to thank a friend on Facebook for pointing out this important observation to us. Yes, yes, as editors we should have starred the day.) Award winning newsletter writer and teacher, Jeff Rubin, – a.k.a. Punctuation Man – established National Punctuation Day (NPD) in 2004. Rubin, who gives school presentations on punctuation and promotes […]
Singing voices are customarily divided into different registers: the head register, and the chest register depending on where the sound seems to be coming from. Thus, if a singer is singing in his or her head voice, the tone will resonate in the head. The chest voice resonates in the chest. The easiest way to […]
By now, everybody knows that Jonathan Franzen’s new novel FREEDOM is out, and speaking for the book club, we can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, we have been mulling over the reviews and the controversy that Franzen inevitably, it seems, excites. Don’t we love it? Is the book “a masterpiece of American fiction” […]
If we weren’t so stodgy, we probably would have picked up the book before. Girlfriends have raved about it. But it wasn’t until our daughter apparently started to live it – traveling to Indonesia and falling head over heels for a South American – that we decided we had to find out what Elizabeth Gilbert’s […]
I’ve just started a Shakespeare class, and I have to be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan. I’ve always had trouble with the roundabout language and all of those references to Ancient Greek mythology. But so far, my class has been far more interesting than anticipated. We’ve just finished up with Titus Andronicus, long […]
If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, then you know one of the hardest bits of grammar to grasp is pairing the right prepositions with the correct adjectives and verbs. If we think about the literal meaning of our preposition pairs, many of them actually seem quite arbitrary. In Spanish, one dreams “with” instead of […]
Linda, Molly and I have discussed recently whether anyone reads anymore. Certainly they do, but we’ve agreed it’s not in the same way that people used to. There’s something to be said about the quick fix read – the thriller or romance novel you can read on the beach, or during your commute on the […]