I wish you'd write something about the common error of using the word "that" instead of "who" when referring to people. For example, "Ben is the one that wrote the article" or "the people that read Ben's article will be enlightened."--W.G. Moss

That kind of bugs me, too, W.G., and has since I started noticing it popping up in my students' writing about six or seven years ago. I wrote about it in an essay called "The Elements of Clunk"--I took it as one example of an odd long-term trend of people wanting to elongate their writing, even if only by one letter. (Other examples are "one-year anniversary" instead of "first anniversary"; the comma after sentence-starting "But" or "And"; "amongst" instead of "among"; and the expression "not too big of a deal" instead of "not too big a deal.")

But no matter how much it annoys you and me, it's not wrong. "That" has been used to...

No less than scratchy records and faded photographs, antique slang can powerfully and palpably evoke an era. Of course, the longer ago the era, the less intelligible the slang. Last week, for my blog, Not One-Off Britishisms, I was looking into the history of the verb pip (“to defeat or beat narrowly”) and found this 1838 citation from the journal Hood’s Own, or Laughter From Year to Year...