Author Archive | Neal Whitman

I also got a lot of reader responses to my post on “You’re not the boss of me!” Most of them wrote to tell me that if I had not been so quick to filter the They Might Be Giants song “Boss of Me” out of my Google search, I would have learned that it […]

Several VC readers responded to my post about the hook Everybody does what they do best the best in a children’s song (“The Mighty Worm,” on Ralph’s World: Peggy’s Pie Parlor). Maestro and Russ Petti noted the existence of a reasonable, non-tautologous, fifth reading of the line. It’s that whatever activity is your personal best, […]

Every now and then I’ll read a column on English grammar where the author or one of his readers is complaining about the unnecessary of in phrases like this: too big of a job The columnists that I’ve seen address this issue always stick very boringly to the tiny question of whether the of belongs […]

Mark Liberman has an interesting post over at Language Log about the spelling of interjections and onomatopoetic words in comic strips. It brought back a memory of a Broom Hilda strip I read sometime in the 5th grade. Someone was getting beaten up, and the frame showed the standard cloud of dust with fists and […]

Here is something that my brother Glen never said to me while we were growing up: You’re not the boss of me! However, he did say this on a number of occasions: You’re not my boss! For the past few years, though, I’ve been hearing the first phrasing much more than the second one, and […]

Imagine that you’re back in elementary school, having a discussion on the playground with one of your classmates. It goes something like this: You: My dad can beat up your dad! Classmate: Nuh-uh! What is the proper response here? For me, it is and has always been, “Uh-huh!” But in the past few years, I’ve […]

I was listening to one of our many kids’ CDs in the car the other day. That’s (many (kids’ CDs)), not ((many kids’) CDs), BTW. Anyway, it was from the Ralph’s World series, and the first track is a really catchy song that starts off like this: Everybody does what they do best the best […]

In my posting on almost-recursive acronyms, I noted that the company Cygnus, whose name expands to “Cygnus, Your GNU Support,” was not guilty of what I referred to as acronym stacking. This is the name I give to an acronym including a letter that abbreviates a different acronym; as I like to think of it, […]

Someone I know once told me, I like to peoplewatch.” In May 2003, a gossip column had a quotation from Ashton Kutcher, concerning a party that George W. Bush’s daughters had attended at his place in 2001. Kutcher said, The Bushes were underage drinking at my house. These two sentences caught my ear because of […]

One time back in elementary school, I heard a teacher talking about the logistics of an upcoming field trip, and she said something like this: Everyone can’t fit on the bus. I was confused. Did she seriously mean to say that not a single one of us could fit on the bus? How was that […]

There’ve been a number of posts about acronyms recently on some of the blogs I read. One was from me, one from Glen, and one from the guy at Semantic Compositions. This last one reminded me of a letter to the editor I wrote some 15 years ago. The post is about recursive acronyms, the […]