At the end of spring semester — that is to say, before many of you arrived at CUNY —  a grab bag of a post on this blog included a section on danglers. As I explained then: “Dangle” means “to hang loosely,” according to merriamwebster.com. In English, a dangling modifier — dangler for short — is […]

Caz was a mainstay of the culture copy desk at The New York Times. Though Caz (short for Don Caswell) had a heart of pure mush, he enjoyed playing the role of crusty old newspaper guy until the day he retired, less than a year before he died in 2005 of all those cigarettes newspaper […]

           Starlight, star bright            First star I see tonight            I wish I may, I wish I might            Have the wish I wish tonight. American kids learn this nursery rhyme at an early age. But few think […]