This Friday editorial is fun, plain and simple. The staff of The Week compiled 14 wonderful words with no English equivalent, and the headline is entirely accurate ( Read more... )

English is full of phrases that get sprinkled through conversation. We pick them up, use them, and don't think too hard about them until we have to write them down. Then we realize we're not quite sure what the exact phrase is. lauramcewan asked us about one of these: "Is it 'one and the same' or 'one in the same'?" When spoken, the phrase tends to sound like ( Read more... )

Two characters have sexily stripped off their tops. One is gently laying a line of kisses down the other from neck to … er … is it naval or navel? Using the wrong one is going to generate some confusing mental images.

Let’s look at these two words with some help from the Avengers.

One of our readers asks, “How many exclamation marks are too many? What is the standard usage on number of exclamation marks in a sentence or on a page?”

This sounds like a question born in the era of OMG!!!!!1!!1eleventy!, but questions around overuse of exclamation marks-or exclamation points in American English-have been around for much longer ( Read more... )

Our question today is from ely_baby, who wants to know: When writing mostly in the present tense, what tense should be used for events in the past?

There are a lot of past tense choices, and all of them can work with a present tense narrative. ( I will use Daisy, from Agents of SHIELD, to illustrate the options with some present day action and past history. )

Our question today is when to use hoard versus horde. Both words have to do with a mass quantity, so they are often used interchangeably. But this is an error, as they do have separate, distinct meanings. Here's how to know when to use which, ( with examples using characters from The Hobbit. )

Today’s question is why we say “sleep tight” and not “sleep tightly.” After all, “sleep” is a verb, so shouldn’t we use the adverb form “tightly”?

Readers of a certain age might remember a similar issue with Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign in the 1990s, which had thousands of people crying, “No, think differently!” More recently, ( Read more... )

The grammarians and readers of fandom_grammar know that there are readers who don't notice misspellings, wrong verb tenses, or sentence structure errors-and then there are readers for whom those things are like nails on a chalkboard. Other errors can be just as annoying to people: the policewoman watching a cop show in which the heroes are shooting off several ( Read more... )

Our question today is how to correctly write dialogue with action/narrative. Here's an example of why this is necessary (with the detectives from Hawaii Five-0):

"Are there any malasadas left? I'm starving." Steve smiled ( Read more... )

Our question for today is how to punctuate a bulleted list when a statement comes right before the list. I will add numbered lists, as well.

There are actually two parts to this answer: the statement that comes before the list and the list itself. Both have a variety of options, and it seems no two resources agree. ( Here is a grammarian's advice with some examples from Teen Wolf. )