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Articles by Patricia T. O’conner
What Everyone Was Saying (Published 2012)
Credit...Illustration by Rex Bonomelli Nov. 2, 2012 Dictionary making has always been a much misunderstood art. The lexicographer’s job is to capture the language as people use it and understand it. But most people who go to a dictionary don’t care about common usage. They want to know what’s right.
A Comic Novel, a Mystery, a Love Story, a Melodrama - All About Words
fiction Credit...Jasjyot Singh Hans Jan. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY By Eley Williams You wouldn’t expect a comic novel about a dictionary to be a thriller too, but this one is. In fact, Eley Williams’s hilarious new book, “The Liar’s Dictionary,” is also a mystery, love story (two of them) and cliffhanging melodrama. The twin protagonists are separated by more than a century.
A Defense of the Semicolon and Other Adventures in the English Language
Nonfiction Jul 30, 2019 THE DICTIONARY WARS The American Fight Over the English Language By Peter Martin Martin’s account of the dictionary feuds of the 19th century is as lively and entertaining as the battle itself. In one corner was Noah Webster; in the other, Joseph Emerson Worcester. Both seasoned lexicographers, they realized that Americans were coining new words, using old ones in new ways and preserving usages the British had dropped.
Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar Is Wrong
And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” It’s a great story, but it’s a myth. And so is that so-called grammar rule about ending sentences with prepositions.
A Literary Mystery Unspools in a Noirish Nova Scotia
Robert Capa’s stark photograph “Death on a Leipzig Balcony,” taken in April 1945, shows an American soldier who’s been shot dead by a German sniper in the closing days of World War II. As the body lies bleeding, partly on the sunny balcony of a German apartment and partly in its shadowy interior, a figure is visible at the right, a soldier crawling toward his comrade. In Howard Norman’s new mystery novel, that soldier is taken out of the shadows and given a name, Bernard Rigolet, and a short life.
‘The Dogs of Littlefield,’ by Suzanne Berne
Leafy, prosperous Littlefield sounds too good to be true. An idyllic Boston suburb, it ranks No. 6 on The Wall Street Journal’s list of the 20 Best Places to Live in America. Band concerts, well-tended Victorian houses, enlightened citizens — what could go wrong? Cue ominous music. In the world of fiction, as we all know, a charmed setting is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And with a novelist like Suzanne Berne in charge, we aren’t disappointed.
Op-Ed Contributors - The I’s Have It - NYTimes.com
WHEN President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics.
‘Between You & Me,’ by Mary Norris
Copy editors are a peculiar species (I’ve been one myself, and at the very publication you are now reading). But those at The New Yorker are something else entirely, a species nova that mutated into existence in 1925 and would hurl itself off a cliff rather than forsake the dieresis in “coöperate.” For the uninitiated, The New Yorker is a magazine that until 2003 spelled the word “deluxe” with a hyphen: “de-luxe.” It inserts periods into “I.B.M.,” though IBM itself dropped them long ago.
All-Purpose Pronoun
What can you say in 140 characters? On Twitter, that’s your limit per tweet. The Twitterati consider this the last word in writing lite, but they’ve devoted quite a few tweets to a venerable linguistic quest that has long thwarted old-media types: the search for an all-purpose pronoun that’s masculine or feminine, singular or plural.
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