I know it seems impossible but I think when Congress is in recess our national discourse gets even more stupid (stupider?).
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
At which time probably even less people know the meaning of the term non-pejorative.
‘less?’ how ’bout ‘fewer’?
(one of a few quirks in writing that drives me nuts–like dripping water) ‘less’ when dealing with amounts…like ‘less grain’, or ‘less filling’. ‘Fewer’ when dealing with numbers…like ‘fewer people’, ‘fewer corncobs’ (for conservative posteriors)
….now onto the next fight, showing people there’s no ‘their’, ‘there’…….. 😉
Don’t get me started on ‘to’ and ‘too’.
And ‘then’ and ‘than’!
nalber
Affect & effect are my hobby horse.
It’s “its” for me…
For me it is “loose” when you mean “lose.”
The affect on this blog tends to cause funny effects upon my state of mind.
For sure. During the primaries and the general election campaign that error was all over the internets.
I have two of recent usage:
“an historical…” Hint: in English, “H” is a consonant and not silent
“when I graduated [high school/college/graduate school]” – Hint: you don’t do the the grading of the school; the school does the grading of the student’s competence level. The idiom used to be “graduated from ….” maybe implying “got graduated from…” or “received my final grades from…”
I hope you are not going to ask me to diagram that.
Do they still have students diagram sentences? I used to hate going up to the board (chalk boards!) and doing it. Maybe because 1) I hated it and 2) because I hated it, I refused to be good at it.
What a waste of time. One good thing about the internet, it’s helping kill ‘proper’ english.
nalbar
Diagramming helped make me a lot of money as a technical writer. I’d take an engineer’s sentence from the specs that I didn’t understand, then diagram it. At that point, it was easy to write it so it made sense.
Other than forcing you to write clearly (which I am now out of the practice of doing) when you are trying to explain something complicated…it’s main use is in translation between one professional group’s jargon and another’s.
The internet is not about English. It’s about immediacy and not so much about clarity.
This is generally a no-grammar-police zone.
If it wasn’t, I would have been kicked out a long time ago.
Their their, FM. Me two.
Ya gots too many dashes. 😉
.
Interesting, graphs included …
(MIT Press) – Political polarization, income inequality, and immigration have all increased dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. The increases have followed an equally dramatic decline in these three social indicators over the first seven decades of the twentieth century. The pattern in the social indicators has been matched by a pattern in public policies with regard to taxation of high incomes and estates and with regard to minimum wage policy. We seek to identify the forces that have led to this observation of a social turn about in American society, with a primary focus on political polarization.
Our primary evidence of political polarization comes from analysis of the voting patterns of members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Based on estimates of legislator ideal points (Poole and Rosenthal 1997 and McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 1997), we find that the average positions of Democratic and Republican legislators have diverged markedly since the mid-1970s. This increased polarization took place following a fifty-year blurring of partisan divisions. This turning point occurs almost exactly the same time that income inequality begins to grow after a long decline and the full effects of immigration policy liberalization are beginning to be felt.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Is Congress now in recess?
Can Obama appoint Dawn Johnsen and a whole bunch of US Attorneys before the New Year?
certainly came out of left field.
And now that you mention it, yeah, it’s like way more stoopider than ever!