Grammar Lovers, Unite!

It has come to our attention that we missed a major grammar milestone last week.  Apparently, March 4 was National Grammar Day.  They even recorded a YouTube music video of their original song, "March Forth" (Get it? Of course you do, if you're reading Liquid Ridiculous).  That website has a number of other delectable offerings, such as grammar-related poetry.

In addition, there are a few things every Liquid Ridiculous reader should know about.  You'll probably want to become acquainted with the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), at whose website you can download your very own official membership card.  I also recommend joining their facebook group (search SPOGG) and perusing the photos of bad grammar posted by members. 

I heartily endorse the Society's online journal; I'm surprised they don't call it the SPOGG Blog.  Like us, they post grammatical musings, only more regularly.  Also, there's a fantastic list of grammar-related links in honor of National Grammar Day.

Finally, you might just want to get yourself a copy of grammar maven Martha Brockenbrough's new book, Things That Make Us [Sic].  Pointing out bad grammar in the world is fun!  And sometimes it makes us feel better about ourselves -- isn't that right, dear readers?

We hope you had a syntactically satisfying National Grammar Day, and we wish you many more.  And we pledge not to forget it next year.

Discovering Ambrose Bierce

Your Liquid Ridiculous team recently came across a pair of radio broadcasts on the topic of Ambrose Bierce, a famous turn-of-the-previous-century linguist, pedant, and apparently general curmudgeon.  He's probably most famous for The Devil's Dictionary, a clever and sarcastic dictionary with, as an example, a definition of "love" that begins: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage."  In a special mini-podcast edition of the independent radio show "A Way With Words" -- which incidentally we highly recommend if your public radio station subscribes to it or you're of a podcasting bent -- one of the hosts interviewed an author who's written a new book about Bierce's writings, life, and character.  We hope to review it for the blog one day.  (We hope generally to begin writing germane book reviews, but that would require having time to read books.)  NPR also recently ran a quaint little story about quirky linguistic pet peeves, which naturally included some great material from Bierce.