“Obviously.” In my view, the word “obviously” should only be used in arguments when the point asserted is generally beyond debate. Consider an example. When discussing judicial nominations, you could say, “Obviously, Obama has the constitutional authority to nominate anyone he wants.” The word signifies that the point is a shared view that isn’t genuinely […]
Archive | Language
Everybody Knows
The recent “everybody” threads reminded me of one of my favorite songs: Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Note that I quote it just because I like it, not because I think that it by itself is evidence that’s as strong as what I’ve pointed to earlier.
Spurious Grammatical “Rules” of Every Sort Are My Abhorrence
Earlier today, I posted quotes from prominent authors who use “them” with formally singular terms such as “everyone.” A commenter had earlier complained that “Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned by their teachers.” I pointed out that they were apparently sanctioned by leading writers as well. A commenter suggested […]
Kids These Days
A commenter writes: Well it could be worse. I hazard that in 50 years the sex sensitivities of the colloquial speaker will have caused the formal replacement of the generic singular pronoun (he) with the plural pronoun (they), which is safely without gender. Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned […]
Congratulations to Robert Tsai on ‘Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture’
By Kenneth Anderson on November 6, 2009 10:57 am in Academia, Constitutional History, Constitutional Theory, Freedom of Speech, Language
This is coming more than a little late, as the book has been out for a few months, but I wanted belatedly to congratulate my Washington College of Law colleague, Robert Tsai, on his book Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture. I have it on my shelf for night reading, but unfortunately even […]
The Lowly Comma, Revisited
In the Writing Guidelines I distribute to students, I use the following example to illustrate the principle that “everything you put on the page matters”: Everything – every word, every bit of punctuation, every decision to begin a paragraph with one sentence rather than another, every decision whether to use “shall” or “should” or “may” […]