This will hurt me...

Be warned, this cartoon has a touch of 'blue' language. That said, I heartily endorse this message. If you like the 'toons, check out The Rut . It's packed full of them!

I must admit to not being a huge fan of the whole LOLcat phenomenon . The pedant in me has a tendency to get frustrated with the (deliberate, I hope) poor spelling and grammar. Of course, I have little time for textspeak or leetspeak or any such nonsense. Yes, I do understand that it is simply a new way of interacting and a genuine 'voice' of a subculture, I just happen to think that it is stupid, and makes the people who use it look stupid. Hence the LOLHenry that I created the other day, and have posted today. Aside from an inevitable dumbing down of the language (and the standard mode of communication itself), I resent that most LOLCats make felines look like a bunch of ignorant morons. As a unabashed fan of the feline (and apologies to any relatives of Phil Jaques reading this), I feel that the sort of simplistic, inane and poorly constructed nonsense most LOLCat discourse resembles is far more suited to dogs. The canine is infinitely more likely to speak in such a crude...

The US are celebrating National Grammar Day today, and I'm sure that the parties will be numerous and exciting. Having spent seven tortuous years marking thousands of undergraduate essays at UTas, the dire state of proper English is something far dearer to my heart than the odd murdered whale or a smidgen of global warming ! But now you can help . Visit the website for more info. The good folks at Mental Floss are doing their bit , encouraging readers to make personal National Grammar Day resolutions , applying the logic that innumerable micro actions yield impressive macro results. After thinking long and hard about it (fnarr, fnarr), my own personal resolution will be to pay more attention to the compounded hyphen. I know, I know, it's a big call, but we all have to do our bit. Thus from this day forth, I vow to use a hyphen when joining two or more words to serve as a single adjective before a noun. However (and this is the tricky part), when compound modifiers come afte...