HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.

(via @johndiesattheen)

I discovered this via The Oatmeal:

Let’s take for example Whole Foods, a market chain priding itself on selling the highest quality, freshest, and most environmentally sound produce. No one could argue that their selection of organic food and take-away meals are whole, hearty, and totally delicious. But how much thought have you given to how they’re actually presenting their wares? Have you considered the carefully planning that’s goes into every detail that meets the eye?

What has happened to online writing? Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall, both political writers I admire, often post with grammatical errors. Have we decided this medium doesn’t require the rigor of print? Are the errors part of the message? What bananas should I buy?

The utility of the serial comma has always made sense to me, the comments against it don’t.

(thanks, Kelsey)

Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.

To get a sense, it helps to see a few of these emails. Because email is written speech, it’s easy to miss artfulness in them. Yet, take this Palin passage: “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.”

The spelling is flawless—and unlikely to be completely a product of spell-check, which misses errors and often creates others. More to the point, she has an embedded clause (“locking up tax rates”) nested into a main one, with another clause “as Glenn suggests” nested within the embedded one. That’s good old-fashioned grammar school “syntax.” I have known plenty of people with B.A.s who could barely pull it off properly at gunpoint, and several others who would only bother to at gunpoint.

He then goes on to explain why she is facile with the written word and how it speaks to the current, failing models for educational writing.

Architecture is a visual art, along with the buildings speak by themselves.

Those assholes spelled Fuck wrong. Great example for the kids, guys.