by Cole Salao
Difficult-to-understand sentences are mainly due to failure of syntax. When a sentence’s components don’t mesh together, its meaning gets lost or confused. You get run-on sentences, garden path sentences, and crash blossoms this way. What is Center Embedding? In...
by Cole Salao
Language—with all its oddities and variations—can often lead people down amusing paths. One such path is the crash blossom, a headline so confusing and weird that it will leave you scratching your head. Crash Blossoms Crash Blossoms gained its name when editor Mike...
by Cole Salao
English is weird—even experts in the language agree. Though a sentence can look and sound bizarre, it is probably still grammatically accurate. What’s the weirdest, most tangled English sentence you’ve ever encountered? Chances are, there’s plenty more where that came...
by Yen Cabag
“Do you like him like him, or do you just like him?” In one of the most poignant scenes in the 1990s TV series Wonder Years, Kevin Arnold rants in typical teenage passion, demanding to know what’s up with his childhood idol Winnie Cooper and the school...
by Cole Salao
Litotes (also called antenantiosis or moderatour) is a figure of speech where a negative statement is used to affirm a positive statement. It sounds strange and complicated but is actually one of the most used rhetorical devices in English. It’s a clever use of...
by Cole Salao
Figurative language is part of what makes literature so enjoyable to write and read. It lets you create complex meaning that is evocative, imaginative, and fun. One such way to employ figurative language is called zoomorphism. Assigning animal traits to people and...
