Author Archives: Millicent Marcus

As a Romance language teacher, I realize that I have developed a somewhat eccentric way of listening to my native tongue. Because the English “you,” for example, translates both the singular and the plural second-person forms of address, I make assumptions about the grammatical number of that pronoun when it is not indicated by context. »

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows a man with a knife in his back, sitting in the office of his doctor, who cheerfully announces, “Good news! It’s just a metaphor!” Shopping period is hardly the equivalent of the cartoon patient’s plight, but I find myself identifying with this hapless victim of a metaphor »