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Wild and Crazy WTF
About this time of year back in 1991, I was reading Henry Beard’s Latin for All Occasions, a collection of sentences such as “I didn’t expect you home so soon” and “The waitress drew a smiley face on...
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Candy Canes
Potential conflicts for recently married couples, as they determine how Christmas will be celebrated in their new household: Gifts: Do you open some on Christmas Eve, or do you save them all for...
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More Christmas Song Confusion
Doug and Adam participated in our church’s Christmas play last Sunday (uh, the Sunday before last? two Sundays ago?), and as I listened, I noticed a couple of changes the Sunday school teachers had put...
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You Better Not Shout
Yesterday I heard a first-grade boy singing You better not shout,You better not cry,You better not pout,I’m tellin’ you why. . . . He got distracted before he could get to “Santa Claus is coming to...
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Away to the Window I Flew, Tore, and Threw
I’ve written about “The Night Before Christmas” (the poem formerly known as “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) a couple of times before. Once it was to untangle the dense syntax of As dry leaves that before...
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See How They Bunch
On Saturday, Doug and Adam and I were sitting in the performance room of the studio where they have their piano lessons. We were there for the annual Christmas (well, “holiday,” I suppose)...
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Merry Gentlemen?
At the Christmas Eve service earlier this evening, the bulletin listed one of the songs as “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen”, and I saw by the placement of the comma that the words merry and gentlemen had...
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Backformation Collection
Longtime family friends Jim and Mary paid us a visit last week to deliver some cookies and a Christmas present for Doug and Adam. Mary does a lot of crafts, particularly those involving sewing. Doug...
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The Witch Mary
Grammar Girl is running a guest script I wrote today (that is, she’s running it today; I wrote it some time ago), on difficult syntax in Christmas carols in general, and in particular in “What Child Is...
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Christmas Codas
During some of the Advent church services in the past month, and the Christmas Eve service earlier this week, I’ve had occasion to be reminded of a phonotactic constraint that, evidently, wasn’t so...
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Blue Christmas Cannibalism
Looking through the community newspaper, I saw an announcement of the various Christmas-related services that a local church was having. One of them caught my eye: I liked the creative use of the song...
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Black Little People
My brother Glen is a fan of Game of Thrones, and recently he came across a this blog post by Adrienne Marie Brown, where she proposes an all-black cast for GoT. However, when Glen reached the bottom of...
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