The following article is part 1 in a series.

Some time ago, I wrote about a flawed question, in The Official SAT Study Guide from the College Board. In trying to understand the thinking of the question writer, I reviewed the official explanations to the test that are available on the College Board's website through its online course.

In contrast to the somewhat pejorative use of "Democrat Party" by some U.S. Republicans to refer to the Democratic Party, "Democrat Party" appears to be the official English translation of Phak Prachathipat (????????????????).

My wife and I watch a reasonable number of Bollywood and Kollywood (the Tamil-language equivalent) films. As you probably know, the Indian film industry produces more films a year than anyone else, including Hollywood, over 500 films a year in the three most popular languages (Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil).

Via Language Log, comes this urging from Helen Zille (the leader of the South African Democratic Alliance party):

While back-tracking entries in my server log, I ran across the quote that is the title of this post. It comes from Steph Swainston's The Year of Our War. Amazon has "search inside" for this book, so I was able to pull up the context. It's a fantasy, and refers to several invented languages:

From Wired Blogs comes news that HBO's Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, wants us to stop using the term "DRM" (digital rights management) and start using "DCE" (digital consumer enablement) to refer to the system by which media blood-suckers intellectual property owners make sure that we can only view their material on exactly the terms that they dictate.

If Mr. Zitter is serious he needs a crash course in semantics, and perhaps the history of English.

In comparison to the commercial SAT-prep books, the material that comes from the College Board is of much higher quality. That's not surprising, of course, since it's the College Board's test, and they get to reuse all those questions that they have spent so much time (and money) writing, editing, and validating.

When I taught linguistics-for-teachers courses, I spent a significant portion of my class time trying to get students to question their assumptions about language, assumptions that, whether they learned them in school or by general osmosis, are based on premises that linguists know to be incorrect. It always distressed me, therefore, when certain students would make it to the end of the course and drop some comment that made it clear they had internalized little of what I was trying to communicate.

I'm contemplating changing polysyllabic's tag-line to "commentary by a licensed grammarian." Oh, wait! I don't have a license. There's no license required to set yourself up as a grammarian. And it shows in the quality of material that supposedly will teach you grammar. I'm not actually a fan of requiring paper credentials for every field, but the complete lack of quality control in writing about grammar irritates me so much that I fear I'm in danger of becoming just as cranky as Goold Brown:

If you are a high school student studying for one of the big standardized tests (the SAT or the ACT), or if you are the parent of such a student, I have one important piece of advice for you: don't waste your money on commercial test prep books, especially when it comes to the material for writing.