DictionaryForumContacts

 vasya_krolikow

link 28.05.2012 9:08 
Subject: semi-Off: 7 great sites for writers from DailyWritingTips gen.
From usual suspects to obscure gems, from grammar guides to usage resources, here are some websites of great value to writers:
1. Amazon.com
You may have heard of this website — a good place, I understand, to find books (or anything else manufactured). But what I appreciate even more is the “Search inside this book” link under the image of the book cover on most pages in the Books section.
No longer does one need to own a book or go to a bookstore or a library to thumb through it in search of that name or bon mot or expression you can’t quite remember. And even if you do have access to the book in question, it’s easier to search online (assuming you have a keyword in mind that’s proximal in location or locution to your evasive prey) than to try to remember on what part of what page in what part of the book you remember seeing something last week or last month or years ago.
And then, of course, there are the site’s “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” features — but the book search can be a writer’s salvation.
2. Banned for Life
Newspaper editor Tom Mangan’s site lists reader contributions of clichés and redundancies.
3. The Chicago Manual of Style Online
My review on this site of The Chicago Manual of Style notes that buying the bulky book, despite its abundance of useful information, is overkill for writers (but not editors), but editorial professionals of all kinds will benefit from the CMOS website’s Style Q&A feature, which responds authoritatively, sensibly, and often humorously to visitors’ queries.
4. GrammarBook.com
The late Jane Straus, author of The Blue Book on Grammar and Punctuation, created this site to promote her book, but it also features many simple grammar lessons (with quizzes), as well as video lessons, an e-newsletter, and blog entries that discuss various grammar topics.
5. The Phrase Finder
A useful key to proverbs, phrases from the Bible and Shakespeare, nautical expressions, and American idiom (the site originates in the United Kingdom), plus a feature called “Famous Last Words” and, for about $50 a year, subscription to a phrase thesaurus. (Subscribers include many well-known media companies and other businesses as well as universities.)
6. The Vocabula Review
The Principal Web Destination for Anyone Interested in Words and Language
Essays about language and usage; $25 per year by email, $35 for the print version.
7. The Word Detective
Words and Language in a Humorous Vein on the Web Since 1995
This online version of Evan Morris’s newspaper column of the same name (some were also published in the book The Word Detective) features humorous Q&A entries about word origins.

 nephew

link 28.05.2012 11:23 
до кучи: тут можно подписаться на Garner's Usage Tip of the Day
сама книга мастхэв (AmE), а там присылают крошки типа такой:

sanatorium; sanitorium; *sanatarium; *sanitarium.

Dictionaries are almost evenly split between the spellings "sanatorium" and "sanitorium" (= an institution for the treatment of chronic diseases or care of long-term convalescents; a health resort). *"Sanatarium" and *"sanitarium" are needless variants -- e.g.:

o "Early Tuesday, Carter -- the first former or current American president to visit Castro's Cuba -- was to visit Cuba's AIDS sanatarium [read 'sanatorium' or 'sanitorium'] and a farm cooperative, both on the outskirts of Havana." "Carter Debates Castro on Rights, Democracy," Deseret News (Salt Lake City), 14 May 2002, at A4.

o "More than 47,000 people were hospitalized in the state tuberculosis sanitarium [read 'sanatorium' or 'sanitorium']." Karen Bair, "Looking Back," Herald (Rock Hill, S.C.), 24 Feb. 2003, at D1.

The plural form is "sanatoriums" or "sanitoriums" -- preferably not *"sanatoria" or *"sanitoria."

Although some writers have tried to distinguish "sanitorium" as a facility for physical healthcare from "sanatorium" as one for mental healthcare, dictionaries record the same meaning for both terms from the mid-19th century on.

*Invariably inferior forms.

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Quotation of the Day: "English does more than borrow; it absorbs. If a word, no matter what its source, is useful to us, it becomes our own and is part of English. Just as 'macaroni,' 'sauerkraut,' 'banana,' 'chile,' and 'vanilla' have become a part of our national diet, so too have the words become ingested in the common tongue. The new word of today becomes the familiar word of tomorrow." Robert C. Pooley, "One People, One Language," as quoted in The Ordeal of American English 57, 58 (C. Merton Babcock ed., 1961).

 vasya_krolikow

link 28.05.2012 13:27 
алаверды от нашего столика
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php

 

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