Notes From A Bear's Journey

      Aren't you growing tired of "breaking" news, as if every road closure or stubbed toe is now of vital importance.  Way back (as in 20 years ago) the documentary OutFoxed  credited Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News with all the features you now see on virtually every news broadast: the wavy movement in the background, the moving news feeds on the bottom, and of course, the banner that interrupts the broadcast with "breaking news."  But such news is now so ordinary that it's become a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing; even the NY Times online version of it is now so common that soon "breaking" news will simply be a reminder of "broken" news.  On the other hand, poking fun at this condensed format does prove a good way for me to clear out my pile of miscellaneous "news" building ever higher, each tidbit goading me into wondering if added together they could prove enough to be a cohesive subject or just remain a series of ran

      About that spelling (and to think I just wrote about grammar)...but you get the idea.  Basically, we're old school, my wife and I, perhaps because we can say that because we're old, despite how we feel (but we're nowhere near as old as Trump or Biden, or even Bibi Netanyahu, if that's what you were wondering).  So when those dictionary folk recently came out and said that it was officially okay to end sentences with a preposition (just think of a word being pre-positioned in a a sentence), well I had to wonder what the heck were they thinking of?  Here's what linguist John McWhorter opined: Late last month, Merriam-Webster shared the news on Instagram that it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition.  Hats off to them, sincerely.  But it is hard to convey how bizarre, to an almost comical degree, such a decree seems in terms of how language actually works.  It is rather like announcing that it is now permissible for cats to meow.   There has long been a tac

     While fortunate enough to still have avoided Covid, I finally succumbed to a head cold, complete with sniffles and that feeling of somewhat puffy eyes as if it were already spring and clouds of pollen were floating around (but it isn't spring because another large batch of snow is due to arrive, adding even more to the heavy snowfall already in our mountains).  But relaying the idea of a head cold vs. a headcold or a head-cold (or even cold head) reminded me of the section in Joanne Anderson's book on punctuation (she's the chief desk editor of the daily Australian paper, The Age ).  In that chapter she writes about why and when two words became hyphenated, or simply became a single word: Delta Air Lines or Delta Airlines (it's the former); check-up or checkup; non-fiction or nonfiction.  She notes that other one-word combos simply returned to two separate words: ice cream, test tube, and fig leaf among them, although I never recall ever seeing those words as sing