Category: Sunday Judgment
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Newbie Soccer Thoughts
I am a systems person; I enjoy watching new systems in action and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I’m also, as one of my CPE supervisors pointed out to me this week, an associative person; I like making connections between seemingly disparate things (both a blessing and a curse in the CPE…
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Missing, Presumed Fed
It may appear that I’ve pulled a succession of Lig Lury, Jr.’s these last two weeks’ worth of evenings. However, this editor hasn’t been out grabbing food every night. I’ve actually just been trying to recover and catch up a bit from the semester, to get moving on summer research, and to take care of…
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Sunday Judgment VII
Today’s lesson: not all copy is created equal. If you have the final responsibility (or even part of it) for the copy in some publication, I submit to you that it’s a good rule of thumb to spend twice as much time copy editing the text in headlines, captions, etc. than you would on the…
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Special Combined Sunday Judgment/Hacker Within: March Madness
Today’s subject: the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. First, a couple of confessions. (1) It’s a bit of a stretch to throw the Hacker Within label on this post, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to integrate my two regular features in one post. (2) Since I have picks to make, and also fair number…
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Off Today
I’m gonna take a break from the Sunday Judgment column, and posting in general, today. If you really need a language fix, Safire‘s got the etymology of waterboarding. An added bonus is that it’s a vicious, though typically subtle, indictment of this horrifying practice. Also, congrats to Wauwatosa East, my alma mater, for winning the…
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Sunday Judgment VI
A couple of years ago, my one-a-day usage errors calendar (yes, I had one) went off mission for a page to tackle a pronunciation issue. I’ll take that as license to do likewise. To be honest, though, I think the author and an awful lot of other people make too big a deal about this…
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Sunday Judgment V
I don’t have much ire left after two straight grumpy posts, so I thought in this installment we could just all meditate on an increasingly divisive issue: “‘They’ as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.” It sounds as if Randall Munroe is “all for it,” as is my friend Scott, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who…
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Sunday Judgment IV
Today’s subject: the naked this. My copy editing habits for any particular usage issue tend to go in cycles: Depend on logic, intuition, and sound before taking time to do research on the issue or to realize it’s even an issue at all. Research the issue or be told about it by someone else. Develop…
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Sunday Judgment III
Today’s subject: nauseated vs. nauseous. As I folded laundry this morning, trying to decide on a “Sunday Judgment” topic, I listened to some especially good moments in today’s special encore addition of Prairie Home Companion. In the “News from Lake Wobegon” segment, Garrison pulled a typically self-conscious SNOOT move: he used nauseated where most of…