Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson is being accused of plagiarism in her latest book, the latest in a string of high profile authors who have been accused of such things. It always baffles me when experienced writers are accused of plagiarism. If deliberate, you would think that they would be smart enough to realize that they would be caught, given their fame and the wide readership their works will have, and the fact that they have usually not quoted from obscure archival material but contemporary ones. My guess is that at least for some of these people, the plagiarism is inadvertent, when they have internalized someone’s words to the extent that they have forgotten where it came from and think it is their own.
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I have noticed in public discourse an increased use of the phrase ‘going forward’ or alternatively ‘moving forward’. It is used usually in sentences such as “This is what we should we do going forward” and what is noticeable is that the phrase almost never serves any useful function and can be dropped without any loss of meaning, since the rest of the sentence already implies some future action. It seems to be there purely as a filler.
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I have written before about the tendency of some people to use what seems like a more erudite word in place of a perfectly good ordinary one, perhaps in order to sound more learned and thus have their words carry more weight. In that case, it was the use of ‘misnomer’ instead of ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘misconception’.
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Take a look at this sentence in an article in The Guardian. The author writes, “Few attendees at Sanders rallies – least of all Sanders – seem the least bit phased”. The context clearly implies that the author meant to use the word ‘fazed’ which means “to cause (someone) to feel afraid or uncertain”, whereas ‘phased’ means something else entirely.
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Morten Just has created a text editor called Cleartext (for Macs only) that autocorrects your writing so that your text contains only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. Just says that the goal is to make writing easier to be understood.
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We have had interesting discussions in the past on this blog about the use of language. This New Yorker article by Adrienne Raphel titled A History of Punctuation for the Internet Age discusses the evolution of punctuation over time and the strong feelings that it generates between purists and those who are more tolerant of contemporary modifications.
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I like to insert quotes in my writings because it spices things up. But I have learned from bitter experience that one needs to check carefully the sourcing of a quote because some of them, especially well-known ones, are fake in that the alleged authors never actually said them, though in blog posts that are rushed I sometimes forget to practice the required due diligence.
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Read this short essay and see if you notice anything.

My fellow countrymen, I speak to you as coequals, knowing you are deserving of the honest truth. And let me warn you in advance, my subject matter concerns a serious crisis caused by an event in my past history: the execution-style killing of a security guard on a delivery truck. At that particular point in time, I found myself in a deep depression, making mental errors which seemed as though they might threaten my future plans. I am not over-exaggerating.
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Linguist Stephen Pinker has compiled a list of 58 words and phrases that he claims are commonly misused, frequently because those words are very close in spelling to other words and people confuse them. As someone who writes a lot, I was naturally curious as to how many of those errors I was committing.
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