Writing is unnatural for humans. What we are good at is speaking. And that is why we so often get messed up when writing and why there is a whole subculture of people who get their kicks out of noticing errors. Some people thrill to see a self-published book that starts with a “forward” rather than a “foreword.” In matters grammatical, I feel very much the way I do in the Democratic primary: I do take a side, but I’m very sympathetic to the other side. Let us consider, for example, the phrase “just deserts” — meaning deserved consequences.
Most people think the phrase is spelled “just desserts.” And why not?! That is, you may have notice, the way it is pronounced! And it makes sense. If you eat all your dinner, you justly get dessert and if you don’t, you justly get nothing. This is one of the great charms of language. There are so many instances like this. My favorite example is the phrase “beat red.” It is supposed to be “beet red” — in reference to the root vegetable. But “beat red” makes its own sense, given that a good beating will tend to turn the skin beet red. And given the term is used almost exclusively to describe the color of a human face, “beat red” really does make more sense.
Humans are wonderful at this kind of thing. I even think of humans as little more than pattern matching machines. Show a human something meaningless, and they will find meaning in it. When I was a young child, it bothered me that we used BC and AD for dates. Okay, BC stood for “Before Christ.” But what’s with AD? I asked a lot of adults, and the response was always pretty much the same: a shrugg of the shoulders and the question, “After dead?” Well, it’s actually just Latin, anno Domini — year of God. But we try!
The Two Deserts
So what’s up with “just deserts”? Well, when the word “desert” entered the English language around the 13th century, it did it in two ways. First, there is the desert that we all know from nature shows, but generally try to avoid. It comes from the Latin word desertum, which means roughly wilderness. And it comes from an earlier Latin word deserere, which means leave. It is where we get the soft e-sound as in “edible.”
The other “desert” comes from the Anglo-French word deservir — or the past participle of it. Regardless, it means deserve. And it is from this Anglo-French word that we get the soft-i sound as in “dessert.” And thus, “just deserts” sounds exactly like “just desserts.” Merriam-Webster defines this version of “desert” as “the quality or fact of meriting reward or punishment.” I’m sure it would be marked “archaic” if it weren’t for a bunch of moral philosophers and the single construction “just deserts.”
Just Deserts or Just Desserts, That Is the Question!
The phrase creates a bit of a problem in writing. It is about as likely to be spelled one way as the other. And I dare say that if you asked one hundred reasonably literate people to spell the phrase, 90 of them would spell it “just desserts.” If you spell it that way in your writing, you are wrong historically. That is not the way the phrase has been spelled and I dare say there is no style guide that would accept it. On the other hand, if you spell it “just deserts” you come off as a bit of a prig.
Luckily, there’s really no reason to use it. “He got what he deserved” works as well as, “He got his just deserts.” And there’s nothing terribly colorful about the phrase. But if you have to use it, I’d stick with history, and use “just deserts.” But if you want to use “just desserts,” I completely understand.
Sometimes it’s difficult to conjure a clear memory of US political life before Donald Trump. But one of its most salient oddities was that the establishment elite considered it crass (if not outright slanderous) to suggest, in ideologically mixed company, that only one of the two major parties drew upon the support of bigots for political power.
Almost ten years ago, 
Most Americans have never heard of donor-advised funds and would be surprised to learn that, measured in donated dollars, the second-most-popular “charity” in 2015 (just behind the United Way) was not the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or Harvard or other universities. It was Fidelity Charitable, an organization created and serviced by Fidelity Investments for the purpose of holding charitable donations. Fidelity Charitable acts as a middleman, attracting its customers’ charitable donations and managing them in separate client accounts. Money in such donor-advised funds is invested and held until the clients give instructions (“advise”) about distributions to operating charities.
Okay, I rail against grammar pedants around here a lot. But there is something that drives me crazy. Here’s an example, “Besides medical care, Shady Brooks also offers a free euthanasia program.” But I’ll bet that almost no one sees the problem with this sentence. Certainly the many professional writers I work with don’t — despite my explicitly telling them about it. The problem is that “also” is redundant.
The UK, by its own volition, has been the route of austerity… They voted for it themselves. You know, similar outcomes, not as bad as you`ve seen across the eurozone [eg, Greece, Spain], still their economy`s not been great. Most people have very little to show over the last eight years, nine years. You`ve had cuts in public services. National Health Service has been a big issue. People are talking about older people. Older people need health care.
I had a brief interaction with Ramona Grigg at 
The second of two Bernie Sanders camps are those who really do want a political revolution. I like them. I salute their idealism! But far too many of them have bought into tired lies about the Clintons brought to you by the Conservative Book Club in the 1990s. I’m pretty sure this comes after the idealism. It is a natural reaction to vilify whoever stands in the way of your noble goals. So it’s understandable but not acceptable.
The English language is in a dreadful mess. It always has been and always will be. That is its great splendor. At least since the arrival on our shores of a ruling class who spoke a different tongue from the common poeople, glorious civil war within the language has been a permanent condition.
We think about society all wrong and that is nowhere as clear as our thinking on the issue of education. Hillary Clinton brought out a plan yesterday to make college far more affordable, and I am largely in agreement with 
The Talmud tells a story: the reason God covenanted with the Jews was that they were the only ones who were willing to take the deal.
I’ve noted it many times, but it bears repeating: you know someone’s argument is nonsense when its justification keeps changing. I most associate this with conservatives. But the truth is that as the Democratic Party moved further and further to the right over the last 40 years, we’ve seen a lot of the same thing from liberals — especially when it comes to trade policy. And a great example of it came from The Very Definition of Liberalism Himself™, 
