Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

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Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

ThyMaster

This Slate story by Dahlia Lithwick has the headline "Love thy enemy?", which is wrong, though not, I suppose, as wrong as mixing up "principle" and "principal", because as you can see here and also as I said two whole years ago, you use "thy" in front of a consonant sound and "thine" in front of a vowel sound, exactly as you do with "a" and "an", so even though I concede that the rule was not followed one hundred percent in, say, the time of the writing of the King James bible, it was well-established a couple of hundred years later and remains the standard to this day, and therefore when you incorrectly write a mild archaism such as "love thy enemy", you look ignorant, Slatefolk (I'm not blaming you, Dahlia--you're wonderful and I know you didn't write the headline).

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