A week from today, 10 am-5 pm, the Union-Tribune and KPBS, both of whom I’ve worked with , will launch our city’s second annual Festival of Books. The setting will be 2875 Dewey Road, Liberty Station in Point Loma. Along with a galaxy of local authors, I’ll be signing my books in Author Alley. […]
***Read an extraordinary poem by a high school student*** *** Mark Twain called it a good walk spoiled, and Oscar Wilde defined it as a man fanning a ball with a stick. The activity, of course, is golf. Personally, I don’t play the sport for two linguistic reasons: First, the word golf is, appropriately, flog […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: Cleaning out a drawer, I found an envelope with newspaper clippings from 1944-1960 that had stories about relatives and friends. In each article that mentioned married women they were identified as Mrs. followed by husband’s first and last name, as in “Mrs. John Smith.” It’s amazing it took so long to […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: My granddaughter, who is a college senior, tells me that as long as one can understand the meaning of what a person has said, there is no right or wrong, as to grammatical usage. For instance, if I were to say, “I’ve eaten here before,’ and someone else were to say, ‘”I’ve […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: Now that the white board has all but replaced the old blackboard, what should we use to describe something irritating as nails on a chalkboard? –Doug Miller, La Jolla It wasn’t that long ago that, in the course of a typical lifetime, only the cast of characters playing out the human […]
Next week, Comic-Con returns to San Diego, where, back in August 1970, it began life as the Golden State Comic Book Convention in the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel. That first event drew about a hundred attendees. San Diego Comic-Con has become the largest gathering of comics and pop culture enthusiasts in the […]
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to improvise new words to catch and crystallize the new realities of a new land; to give birth to a new vocabulary endowed with its creators’ irrepressible shapes and flavors; to tell tales taller and funnier than anyone else had ever […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: I wonder if you might write something about the two verbs bring and take? There is a dreadful trend at the moment to use bring for everything. It seems that almost every TV show, especially sitcoms, constantly use the words incorrectly: ‘Did you bring Charles to the station?” “Did you bring […]
This past May 26, my celestial odometer flipped over, and I turned 80 years of youth. My column that day described my joy about that millstone — oops, milestone — in my life, and, in response, I received a billowing mailbag of congratulatory messages. I’m pleased to share a selection of your validating and […]
Why do so many weddings take place in June? Go back centuries, and you will find that the Romans traditionally married in June to honor Juno, the goddess of marriage, and ensure an auspicious union. I grew up reading in DC Comics about the valiant Amazonian warrior-princess-demigoddess-superheroine equipped with her Lasso of Truth and indestructible […]