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The Sunday Funnies: #OverUsedWords
This trending Twitter topic happily vied for my attention while following today’s shocking #TDF12 #tackgate during Stage 14 in the Pyrenees. A saboteur — coincidence that it’s a French word? — spread...
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Willy Nilly Commas? Silly Billy
Will Nilly Electric Company Put commas where you would normally pause in speech. Right? Wrong. Here are two examples by a blogger who stuck commas where she paused instead of where they belong to make...
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Syn City
Hey, announcer for rhythmic gymnastics! About the tenth time I heard the rhythmic gymnastics announcer praise the “synchronicity” of these graceful, athletic nymphs, I took to my Twitter feeds,...
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Homing In On a New Yorker Error
PhraseWit tells it like it is. In my decades of reading the venerable weekly magazine The New Yorker — in hard copy, and now, deliciously, on my iPad — I finally caught a mistake. My heart pounded when...
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Back to School: Commas and Conjunctions
Does this make it any clearer? No? When I edit, the thing I correct the most often is comma placement. Spellcheck catches obvious spelling errors, and usage errors (it’s/its, fewer/less) certainly...
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Letters from the Grammarverse: Possessives
Get your hands off her! She’s not yours. Susan: I thought maybe you can clarify a confusion I’ve always had about possessive pronouns. You don’t use an apostrophe for the possessive version of its and...
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Way Too Nice to “Contemn” Anyone Anymore
Photo for The Daily Blague, September 26, 2012 You could do worse than reading The Daily Blague on, well, a daily basis. It is erudite, witty, informative, personal, thoughtful, deep, culturally...
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Beautiful yet #expensivewords
Sample book titles from D4EO The cool things you discover on Twitter! This morning, I checked my account on the iPad’s Twitter app which apparently I haven’t used for three days. (I’ve been following...
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Write Well or Be Written Off
Greeting me this morning was this Facebook post by my friend and fellow writer and editor Dena Kouremetis: She writes, “No doubt the subject of an upcoming blog.” I don’t suppose Dena thought I’d front...
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Tripping Over Commas
Adding commas where they don’t belong, and omitting commas where they are needed, are like speed bumps to readers. They erode confidence in the text and cause mental stumbles as readers work extra hard...
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