The Sense of Style

some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young

In a panel on sex with four professors,trying to keep related words together won’t help: they already are together.

Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a stringof words

with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.

Many of the silliest ambiguities in the Internet memes come from newspaper headlines and magazine tag lines precisely because they have been stripped of all punctuation. Two of my favorites are MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH and RACHAEL RAY FINDS INSPIRATION IN COOKING HER FAMILY AND HER DOG.

Take this entry on noun plurals, from,of all books, TheNew York Times Manual of Style and Usage:
Nouns derived from foreign languages form plurals in different ways. Some use the original, foreign plurals: alumnae; alumni; data; media; phenomena. But form the plurals of others simply by adding s:curriculums; formulas; memorandums; stadiums.
Were you stopped short, as I was, by “form the plurals”? The passage begins with two indicative sentences whose subjects refer to foreign nouns, and whose predicates comment on how those nouns “form” or “use” the plural. Then, without warning, the third sentence shifts to the imperative mood and we are supposed to have the reader,not the nouns, forming plurals in a certain way.

“The story is a very old one of the drowning Scot who was misunderstood by English onlookers and left to his fate because he cried, ‘I will drown and nobody shall save me!’”

The first is to remember that past tense is not the same thing as past time.

If we take a typical double-wouldconditional (left side) and put the if-clause into the past tense, it instantly sounds classier:

When I asked the editor of the dictionary how he and his colleagues decide what goes into it, he replied, “We pay attention to the way people use language.”