Signoff

Other columns treated issues that remain as irksome as ever: The problematic status of “no problem,” the verbing of nouns (“medaling”), the inclusion of women in “you guys,” the excess of apostrophes in “pumpkin’s” and “cuke’s.”

I’ve been reviewing the archives because I decided, as this anniversary approached, that after 600-plus language columns I was ready to step off the print treadmill. The Word column will continue in these pages, written by my current coauthor, Erin McKean, and others; I’ll stay on the language beat, on a less structured schedule, at my blog, Throw Grammar from the Train.

And that easy shift from print to blog highlights the most dramatic difference between language journalism of 14 years ago and the enterprise today: Even if the questions haven’t changed, the resources available to help answer them have expanded vastly. For word sleuths and other researchers, 1997 was still the old days, a time when newspapers were just getting connected to the Internet. Staff members could search the Globe archives and occasionally the Nexis news database (I think it was charging by the minute back then). Google had been named but not launched; the Oxford English Dictionary was available on disk, but wasn’t yet online; today’s huge English corpora - collections of searchable text - were nowhere to be found.

How did language writers know anything? There were plenty of books to consult, including the indispensable Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage; there were dictionaries, including the OED. But most of the time, the usage mavens - many of us journalists, schooled in the faith of our copy-desk forebears - were just passing on the conventional wisdom. If we could put an entertaining spin on the farther/ further distinction, or illustrate a dangling modifier more amusingly than the last guy, our job was done.