Inclusive language – BOMFOG under attack!

by Jon Rieley-Goddard on 20 May 2012

jon bugI love the acronym BOMFOG, which stands for Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God. If ever there was a bombastic acronym, BOMFOG has to be at the top of the short list.

Long-standing and now-leaning rules of grammar say that when referring to persons, one must use the male pronoun forms to indicate mixed-gender groups.

don logoThe debate over this in the Church goes by the label inclusive language. The wider debate gets folded into the overworked phrase culture wars.

No one fights more fiercely than Christians among themselves, in my view, so I pick up the narrative there.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Signpost words – marking the straight way

May 11, 2012

 Some words, be they ever so small and shy, provide a big service — signposts for the reader. Many writers take away these little words when they should be adding them to mark the path to understanding in the dark forest where the reader can become lost. The writer’s task is to provide good guidance. [...]

Read the full article →

Jerks and quirks: Stuff I do cuz I can

May 4, 2012

Setting aside the examination of actual errors, let us take up the subject of apparent errors. Such as cuz. As in Jerks and quirks: Stuff I do cuz I can. It just looks wrong, almost. What I did in choosing cuz was to think of the word because and reject it, since it is a [...]

Read the full article →

This just in: My copy now is clean

April 28, 2012

I started this book project about a year ago, with one goal from the start: Address the dirty copy issue that so many print-on-demand and electronic books suffer from. I wanted to make that problem my own and offer a solution for all. Sounds grandiose, but that was my goal. In setting such a goal, [...]

Read the full article →

What’s the catch? There is no catcher

April 20, 2012

I’ll try to be brief about this. You will see why. A while back, I posted this Tweet on Twitter – In reading blog posts, again and again I find myself wondering who edits this stuff. If your novel needs an editor, your blog might, too. The problem with hiring an editor to clean up [...]

Read the full article →

The form of function: Not only but also

April 14, 2012

Let us talk about rhetorical pairs. What little that I know about poker could fill a penny-ante pot with room left for the experts to give their two cents’ worth. I do know, however, that two pair beats three of a kind. As one who knows grammar and usage, I also know that form does [...]

Read the full article →

Subjects and Verbs – happy families are all alike

April 7, 2012

When Subject and Verb agree, everyone feels a gladness. If any one or any thing can express gladness, it would be the Parts of Speech, inanimate though they be. Without these Parts, our speaking and writing would be far less than even partial in effectiveness. We would be dumb, in all the senses of that [...]

Read the full article →

The dangling man

March 31, 2012

It’s past time to talk about modifiers, those words and phrases that make simple things less simple and more rich. The flip side is important, too. Getting these things wrong makes what is simple also absurd or misleading. In particular, we will be looking at dangling modifiers and squinting modifiers. Along the way, we will [...]

Read the full article →

Approaches to writing the novel – clever and dense

March 21, 2012

Markets are conversations. – Doc Searls, writing in Linux Journal If you think about it, puns cause laughter or groaning without inflicting injury or insult. This cannot be said for the other forms of humor, where the cleverness pivots upon disaster in some form, like a ballerina losing her focus in mid-twirl and falling quick [...]

Read the full article →

Rambling about writers – content and process

March 16, 2012

Ready to ramble? Some writers make me larger, and some of these same writers just make me feel small and inadequate. These writers, however, take me higher and farther than I can go on my own. Being small, at least in comparison to a hill, dale, or mountain, I am easy to lift. I’m thinking [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries