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READINGS IN LANGUAGE
This new section features links to interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking readings about the English language. The selections could be anywhere from light and humorous to serious and scholarly, and they range widely from the reading, writing, listening, and speaking disciplines to the teaching and learning of English.
Inoculating ourselves against all those journalistic nonsense
How many times have we been taken in by seemingly literally true newspaper headlines and stories that turned out to be seriously misleading if not outright false? These travesties of language and logic are not the sole province of tabloids but of supposedly mainstream media as well, and John Allen Paulos, mathematics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of the best-sellers Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, trots out for dispassionate analysis some of the usual suspects: “Thousands to Die After Swine Flu Vaccination,” “Math Formula Links Your Social Security Number to Your Age,” “Otherworldly Properties of Metal Found at Roswell,” and “Roswell UFOs Foretold in Bible.”
Paulos, who also wrote Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, makes this prescription in ABCNews against all these journalistic tomfoolery masquerading as truth: “Don’t forget to inoculate yourself against the flu and, as much as possible, against nonsense as well.”
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