Slapping the Queen’s English Society around is tiring work, so I took the day off yesterday. But Professor Mark Liberman at Penn took up the cudgels in a Language Log post that drew quite a selection of comments. It’s worth checking out for the grammar cop badge alone.

Also yesterday, Professor Liberman posted an entry on a prescriptivist crotchet that I hadn’t heard. Were any of you instructed that hard is only acceptable in the sense of “tough” or “durable,” and not acceptable in the sense of “difficult”? Hard to believe.

In other developments, Professor Jay Rosen of New York University has posted a catalog of the various biases represented in American journalism. (You may find this interesting if you read my post last week, “The way we tilt now.”) He disdains the commonplace simplifications — that the press represents corporate interests, that the press tilts to the left, and that the press tilts to the right, though evidence of all three is plentiful — to describe the range of values and attitudes actually in play.

A reader who was going around and around with an editor about fragmentary quotes asked whether they are considered bad style. I explained that the Associated Press Stylebook advises against fragmentary quotes, but they remain common — more frequently called partial quotes — in journalism. Full quotation may be unsuitable (wordy, fumbling, containing extraneous material, profane) or simply too difficult to work smoothly into the overall syntax. They may be distracting in more formal writing, but they are too useful in journalism to be shunned. What should be avoided is putting a single word within quotation marks, because instead of indicating emphasis or singularity, it can suggest skepticism or irony.

And finally, The Economist publishes a blog on language called Johnson — after Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer. Check out the post last week on the British author’s discovery that Johnson in American slang suggests something quite different from lexicography.