A glamorous shot of women dressed in black (with furry wraps on a couple) caught my attention online. It turns out they were court reporters dressed up to show that they weren’t all sitting in a corner of a court room cramped over a steno machine. Further research produced another […]
RED EditedInk Blog
National Proofreading Day is celebrated every year on March 8th. That date was chosen by its founder Judy Beaver in 2011 because it is also the date of her mother’s birthday, and her mother loved to correct people. The day is intended to encourage you to read and revise your […]
National Grammar Day was first celebrated in 2008 by founder Martha Brockenbrough to promote awareness and understanding of proper grammar. The day’s motto is: “It’s not only a date, it’s an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!” The way […]
The United Nation’s celebration today fosters multilingualism for inclusion in education and society. International Mother Language Day recognizes that languages and multilingualism can advance inclusion, and their Sustainable Development Goals’ focus on leaving no one behind. UNESCO believes education, based on the first language or mother tongue, must begin from […]
NATIONALL THESAURUS DAY is observed every January 18th to honor the man who put together the first true thesaurus, Peter Mark Roget, a British physician and lexicographer. But what is a thesaurus? A thesaurus is simply a reference work that contains synonyms (and sometimes anonyms) in a dictionary format. The […]
“What’s the best way to refer to someone who isn’t cisgender?” “Uh, what’s cisgender?” Until I did research for this blog, I wasn’t sure of the answer myself. One of the terms becoming more common these days of inclusiveness is cisgender. It means relating to, or being a person, whose […]
It’s National Punctuation Day! Punctuation is the use of spacing and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding of reading. The word itself is derived from the Latin punctus, “point,” and the term was first recorded in the middle of the 16th Century. Punctuation hasn’t changed much since 1500 […]
Any language can incorporate foreign words and most have. Simple contact between cultures is all it takes. John McWhorter in The Power of Babel, says “intercultural contact is the very heart of human history, and thus the six thousand human languages are replete with the results of it.” And, he […]
There was no discrete dividing line between Old English, according to John McWhorter in The Power of Babel, which as spoken would have taken days to recognize as related to what we speak, and “English” as we know it. As it happened, Shakespeare wrote in a period (1500s becoming 1600s) […]
Our Americanized version of English is a conglomeration of words borrowed from different foreign languages. In fact, as John McWorter says in his book, The Power of Babel, the variety of the world’s languages is miraculous because “it is the product of a process of six thousand imperceptibly gradual transformations […]