"Prince is seated at a microphone behind a keyboard, which he keeps playing. This is quite disconcerting..."

"... if he doesn’t like a question, he strikes up with the theme from The Twilight Zone and shakes his head. At one point, he presses a button on the keyboard and the intro to his legendary 1988 hit Sign o’ the Times booms out of the PA. He looks at me. 'You wanna do this?' he says."

Prince does an interview and has his fun with the interviewers, one of whom writes for The Guardian, which — I don't know, maybe it's a British thing — doesn't edit out what to my eye is the run-on sentence of the year: "As skinny as a teenager, sporting an afro and almost unnecessarily handsome at 57 years old, Prince looks flatly amazing, exuding ineffable cool and panache while wearing clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny is just one among his panoply of talents."

I diagrammed that in my head and determined that there needs to be a period after "amazing." But what is the subject of that second sentence, the one with the verb "is"? Answer: "exuding."

And what were the clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny? Mainly the white platform flip-flops with white socks.

This country "was made possible by philosophy."

An apt observation that came up in Jaltcoh's live-blog of last night's debate:

9:11 — Marco Rubio raises the specter of robots replacing workers: "If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine." He adds: "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers!" [VIDEO.] Alex Knepper responds:

The sentiment he's expressing here is precisely what's wrong with our nation's attitude toward education. Our politicians think the meaning and purpose of education is to make money. If something doesn't have an immediate economic purpose, it's treated as useless, even offensive. The irony that Rubio will never grasp is that this exceptional country — the country that made his life possible, and made it possible for the son of a maid and a bartender to run for president — was made possible by philosophy.

That's rather true. My mind went elsewhere. I heard "We need more welders and less philosophers!" and said: "fewer philosophers." And, after a good night's sleep, my morning thought was: Why is it either/or? Welding is a great job for a philosopher.

ADDED: Jaltcoh corrected the Rubio quote and I've corrected my quote of Jaltcoh.

"How would you feel if your 10-year prison sentence depended on a dangling modifier?"

"That's the situation for Avondale Lockhart, whose case was heard Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court...."

According to federal law, Lockhart gets a mandatory 10-year minimum sentence for the child pornography if he had a prior state conviction “relating to aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, or abusive sexual conduct involving a minor.” The crucial words here are “involving a minor.” Lockhart says they apply to the whole sentence. Because his prior conviction was for attempted rape of a woman, not a minor, the law doesn't apply to him. The government says “involving a minor” just refers to the last part of the sentence, “abusive sexual conduct,” not to what came before. It thinks Lockhart should get the 10 years.

Reading that description, it's quite clear that Lockhart should win and that Professor Noah Feldman doesn't know the meaning of "dangling modifier." A "dangling modifier" is what I put at the beginning of the previous sentence. The modifier in that federal statute isn't dangling. It's attached to something it modifies, but there's ambiguity about how much else it modifies.

"Readers say they were 'shocked' to find a mistake on page 72 of my book, 'Between You and Me.' "

"Shouldn’t 'younger than me' be 'younger than I'?"

Mary Norris defends her position declaring that in her book, "than" works as a preposition." (And, in case you don't watch the video, she does understand the argument that "than" is a conjunction)

I bought the book, "Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen." The passage on page 72 — which she isn't going to change — is:

Nothing makes it clearer how intimately and deeply pronouns are embedded in our lives than having to alter them to refer to someone you’ve known all your life. Just when I was mounting an assault on the Italian language, sorting the nouns that ended in a (mostly feminine) from the nouns that ended in o (mostly masculine), struggling to make sense of the ones that ended in e, the difference between sex and gender leaped out of the textbook and into my real life: my younger brother announced that he was transgender. Dee was two years younger than me, and we had been close— or at least I thought we were close. We grew up together in Cleveland and we both escaped to New York, where we were friends, sometimes neighbors, often confidantes, collaborators, drinking buddies....