Child film star Shirley Temple wrote, “I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.” It’s fun to look at the holiday through the innocent eyes of children: A mother was pleased with the Christmas card her […]
Frosty the Snowman and his wife live in an icicle built for two in the Snow Belt on the snow banks of Lake Snowbegone. Where they live, it’s so cold that Starbucks serves coffee on a stick! It’s so cold that people have to scrape the ice off their glasses! It’s so cold that […]
For a goodly number of my readers, defective spelling, punctuation, and pronunciation screech like chalk on a blackboard. It is not my gray hair or my wrinkles that give away my age. It’s my ability to carefully proofread my books, columns, and e-mail messages. A new study at the University of Birmingham brings to […]
Thanksgiving Day is mainly a celebration of the harvest, giving thanks for bountiful crops. Traditionally, a particular meal in 1621 is thought to be the first Thanksgiving. Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians sat down together to an autumn feast of venison and wild fowl. This meal is remembered as a celebration not only of […]
Here’s little poem I’ve conjured up about Halloween monsters: Don’t ever play ping pong with King Kong. Don’t ever take blood tests with Dracula. Don’t you dare give a wedgie to Frankenstein. Your ending will be quite spectaculah! Don’t you dare snap a towel at Godzilla. Such a prank would be foolishly rude. Don’t you […]
I am a member of the Grammar Police force, and our motto is “To Serve and Correct!” How strong is your grasp of English grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation? To help you find out, here’s a passage marred by three dozen goofs and gaffes, blunders and boo-boos, and fluffs and flubs that frequently infest […]
DEAR RICHARD: Contemplating the spread of laboratory-grown, humane meat, I began to imagine a menu for such delectables: Faux-let Mignon, Fakin’, Top Sir-lyin’, Paté Faux Gras, Not Roast, Cloned Beef & Cabbage, Spore Ribs, Prankfurters, Not Dogs, Honey-Baked Sham, Saw-such, Nutton, Chicken Winks, Presto Duck, Cheatloaf, Not Worst, Shadow Briand, and Fauxlish Sawsuch. -Linda […]
Having opened on July 21, “Barbie” has become the highest grossing film of this year and the first billion-dollar film directed by a woman (Greta Gerwig). The “Pink Fever” that the neon-coated fantasy comedy movie has created could ultimately gross two billion dollars. Barbie is the most popular doll in the history of toydom. […]
William Shakespeare began his comedy Twelfth Night with the line “If music be the food of love, play on!” About a century later, the playwright William Congreve opened his comedy The Mourning Bride with the equally famous line “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” (almost always misquoted as “the savage beast”). If […]
I’m button-burstingly proud to announce that you’re reading my 500th column in the Union Tribune. Inspired by this milestone (never a millstone), I celebrate our glorious, uproarious, victorious, stupendous, tremendous, end-over-endous English language. In the year 1599, the poet and historian Samuel Daniel sang of the English language that was coming to full flower during […]