Q: When should you use “since,” and when should you use “because?” Also, can I use “because” at the beginning of a sentence?
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20 10 2015
Don’t Be a Freakin’ Idiom
Upon receiving my edits on an academic paper recently, the author—a non-native English speaker—questioned why I had changed “for reason of” to “for reasons of,” when there was only one reason cited in that sentence. It was a reasonable question for which I didn’t have a good answer, except that “for reasons of” is much more commonly used in English and therefore “for reason of” just doesn’t look right. Knowing this explanation would be wholly unsatisfying, I then suggested “because of” as an alternative, which probably is what I should have changed it to in the first place.
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29 09 2015
Blogging For Profit
Blogging can be an insanely powerful tool in the business world today. As a human face for a company, a blogger, armed with a unique and engaging voice, brings a built-in customer base who are already in love with the brand.
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22 09 2015
Making Inroads With Millennials
There’s been much ado about the millennial generation for the past few years. Whether decrying the cohort’s fondness for selfies or analyzing its symbiotic relationship with mobile devices and the Internet, there’s a glut of judgments and think pieces that attempt to define the attitudes and behavior of those born between 1980 and the early 2000s.
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Q: My 81-year-old grandma has been dating a man her own age for a few years now. They’re not planning on getting married, but they are a “couple.” How should I refer to him? “Boyfriend” just seems weird, and grandma just calls him Larry.
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08 09 2015
Can the Clichés!
They’re tried-and-true, but they’ve been around the block a few times. They’re shopworn, threadbare, and coming apart at the seams. It’s time to put them out to pasture.
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30 06 2015
The Subjectivity of Language
As someone who’s had a passion for language since I was a child, I’ve always enjoyed the nuances of language and how different people use it in different ways. While the subjectivity of language may at times be a source of miscommunication and even frustration in our personal and professional relationships, it’s also reflective of the plurality of expression, the variances in thought patterns, and the differences between cultures.
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Welcome to the very first Language Ninja column of the summer! Let’s pour ourselves a frozen peach iced tea, relax by the pool, and start tacklin’ some rules of grammar and syntax!
Q: Is “close proximity” redundant?
A: A bit, yes. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Ninja won’t go on and on at length about the subject.
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16 06 2015
The Dream of a Common Language
It may be a familiar trope in crime stories, but having a dead body in the trunk is a lousy selling point for an automobile. When Ford launched its ad campaign in Belgium, they wanted buyers to appreciate their excellent manufacturing and came up with the slogan “Every car has a high-quality body.” However translated into Dutch, one of Belgium’s three official languages, the ad became “Every car has a high-quality corpse,” which was less than persuasive. Thanks to a translation error, Ford’s new model sounded as if it was an accessory to a crime rather than something you’d willingly drive off the lot.
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Q: What do landing the perfect job, finding your ideal mate, and winning friends all have in common?
A: They all require you to know how to market yourself.
Yes, it’s the reason people sweat interviews (and first dates), spend hours drafting cover letters, and even pay others to assemble their résumés — we don’t always know the best way to sell ourselves. Marketing yourself is an essential skill to get where you want to go, but the process is often easier said than done.
