"Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes."

The most interesting thing about today's "Gatsby" sentence is the use of plunged for the action of the hands into the pocket...

"They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."

I decided to pluck something from Chapter 1 for today's entry in the "Great Gatsby" project . I randomly selected the sentenc...

"Is 'God, guns, and gays' losing its peril for Democrats?"

A strange way to phrase a question, in this Greg Sargent column . What does this stunning lack of parallelism reveal about the Mind of Sarge...

"Jovan Belcher’s grieving teammates on the Kansas City Chiefs refused to blame guns for his horrifying murder-suicide."

So begins an article at The Daily News. Interesting construction "his... murder-suicide." Normally, when you say "his murder...

"Now that Tampa is out of harm's way, mostly from Isaac, I'm alarmed to see what might happen in New Orleans."

"Head's up, all you central Gulf Coasters!" says MadisonMan, in the comments on the Crist thread , and Meade points me to this...

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee apologizes for saying Republicans had obtained "Chinese prostitution money."

The DCCC admits to making "unsubstantiated allegations," which "was wrong." (Note the grammatical correctness of the ve...

When Antonin Scalia met David Foster Wallace.

"As co-Snoots, we got along very well...."

Diagramming a Sentence About Blogging on Independence Day.

"When someone walks down the street in a button-down and khakis, the bad guy gets a glimmer of fear, wondering: are they packing or not?"

A spokeman for Woolrich (a company that makes relatively stylish pants that have compartments for carrying a gun) is quoted in a NYT articl...

"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really co...

Watch me not split an infinitive.

"I do think I’m in love with you when I’m with you."

"But it’s awfully hard for me to stay in love with someone when I only see them every three months and when the only contact I have wit...

"Rich professors doth protest too much."

Says Michael Kinsley. And I might want to read that article, but I'm too annoyed by the use of the verb "dost" with a third-p...

"Your call will be answered in the order it was received."

Why does this common phrase feel grammatically wrong? I was on hold long enough to find the answer : ... a single thing cannot be received i...

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel. I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.'"

"When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want. Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm...

At the Country Store Café...

... either there's no smoking or pets are allowed.

I must correct Barack Obama's grammar.

He said: "A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable. There was a mix of human and systemic failure that ...

Which is the more embarrassing bungling of verb forms?

1. "If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibb...

"Buy American. I Am."

A NYT op-ed by Warren Buffett. That headline . Reminds me of the Stephen Colbert (intentionally humorous) title "I Am America (And So C...

Sarah Palin on prayer and homosexuality. (And I find a blunder in the CBS transcript.)

From Couric's interview with Sarah Palin: Couric: Your church sponsored a conference that claimed to be able to convert gays into hetero...