Here are my answers to the question I set in this post.

The constituency problem, as Jangari correctly noted, concerns the prepositional phrase "with the solemn precision of scientists articulating chemical equations." The original diagramming indicates that the "we" of the sentence are learning with precision, but it seems much more natural to assume that it is the diagramming that occurs with precision. In other words, the PP modifies diagram, not learned.

I just finished reading Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey, a book that purports to tell the history of sentence diagramming. It's not as bad as I had imagined it would be. I had braced myself for an old-fashioned paean to the virtues of diagramming, but in fact Florey is honest about the limitations of diagrams and skeptical about claims that diagramming helps improve one's writing.

That said, there are irritating errors in the book.

This article from the BBC magazine talks about the decline of the hyphen. The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has apparently removed the hyphens from some 16,000 words, reflecting a decline in how people use them.

The title is not an instance of editorial error, nor the start of a question (e.g., "Won't fixing one thing break something else?" but evidence of a new compound verb with a very unusual structure.

I first saw it on a developer's issue board.

"Clearing my issue queue. I don't think these fixes are going to go in anyway - won't fixing."

This is part of a continuing series documenting the shortcomings of the College Board's view of grammar, particularly as exemplified in its explanations for multiple-choice writing questions. (Part 1, part 2, and part 3 here). Please see part 1 for an explanation of how I reference individual questions.

we r n ur bible.

Link via Pharyngula.

This is part 3 of a series analyzing the College Board's view of English grammar. In part 1 I reviewed the general standards for the SAT writing test and argued that they were vague. In part 2, I began to reverse-engineer the grammatical framework used by the test makers and found numerous errors in the explanatory answers that the College Board provides with its practice tests.

Bill Poser argues that the Supreme Court fails semantics in its decision of Morse et al. v. Frederick. He has two main complaints with the Court's analysis.

The first is that it is unwilling to accept the possibility that the utterance is meaningless....

The other error in the Court's analysis is in mistaking one kind of meaning for another.

You'll notice that I've enabled comments for new posts. I'm using the reCAPTCHA service, which both provides a strong captcha challenge and helps proofread books that have been scanned. As someone who used to be very active on Distributed Proofreaders (no time any longer, alas), I think reCAPTCHA is a stupendous idea.

So, help create e-texts. Leave lots of comments.

This is part 2 of a series.
(Part 1, Part 3)

The instructions for the writing sections of the the SAT ask the test taker to use the conventions of "standard written English" in finding correct answers. But as I noted in part 1 of this article, the public specifications as to what that means, are vague.