Logophilius around the Internet

In the last couple months, I've been a substitute blogger at Copyediting.com for a few editor friends who needed vacations. Here are some of my posts that you might find interesting and educational. I encourage you to check these out as well as posts from other copy editors there.


Writing about Gender Identity
In this post, which came out shortly after Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover, I write about the words transgender and cisgender and offer some guidelines for writing fairly and consciously about gender issues.

Is New Election Vocabulary Racist or "Only" Sexist?
This post is about the word cuckservative, what it means, and where it may have come from. The short version: don't use it unless you really want to piss someone off.

Editing Is Not Math
Sometimes I feel like writers expect editors to be able to produce "the one true answer" to every grammar or usage question. The truth is that there's a lot of wiggle room in editing, and that wiggle room is what separates editing as an artform from editing as an algorithm.

Some word games

Go Set a Watchman: A Word Game
Can you use the clues to figure out ten words spelled with the letters in Go Set a Watchman?

Etymatching with Amelia Earhart
I give you the names of ten things that can fly. Can you match the words with their etymological derivations?

An End-of-Summer Doublet
Using the clues, can you get from JULY to DONE to FALL by changing only one letter at a time?

Rain in the Playing
Use the clues to figure out ten words that have RAIN in them.