February 18, 2025
The world of punctuation marks is a kind of soap opera. Some of the characters include the stoic, dependable period; the excitable and somewhat controversial exclamation mark; the overworked, flustered comma; the overlooked and under-appreciated semicolon; etc. Sometimes, those characters Read more…
Question marks might seem fairly straightforward: they come after a question. Easy enough! 😅 However, a few complications might pop up when it comes to punctuating indirect questions, deciding how question marks interact with other punctuation marks, and—heaven forbid—dealing with Read more…
February 4, 2025
I think we all know that words like bam! and pow! are onomatopoeias. But did you know about blimp, cliché, and laugh? Onomatopoeias: A Building Block of Language Onomatopoeia is defined as “the naming of a thing or action by Read more…
No, really. That’s what the theories are actually called. I was researching onomatopoeias and accidentally stumbled upon the bow-wow theory of language origin. I thought that name was pretty funny, and then I glanced at the footnotes, which referenced two Read more…
While researching for another article, I came across this entry in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which explains the word munch: “Copperud 1970, 1980 does not like munch when it is used of eating something that does not crunch.” Read more…
January 21, 2025
Acronyms are words formed from the first letter or letters of each word in a compound term. Technically, an acronym must be pronounced as a single word; when you say each letter individually, it’s an initialism. For the purposes of Read more…
Is redundonym a made-up word? The spell-check feature on my computer certainly seems to think so. But it’s a perfectly good word to describe redundant acronyms, plus it’s just super fun to say out loud (it bounces down your tongue Read more…
Is it “a LED display” or “an LED display”? And would you say “a URL” or “an URL”? Choosing between a or an is one of those grammatical things that native English speakers might have an instinct for, but it’s Read more…
January 6, 2025
You know, I really wish there were just one hard-and-fast set of grammar rules that everyone agreed on and followed all the time. That’d make things much easier for writers, editors, students, and anyone learning English as a second language. Read more…
December 23, 2024
Spaghetto, paparazzo, and confetto may sound unnatural and strange to our ears, but they’re real singular words! The same goes for die, magum, and a bunch of other uncommon singular forms of plural words that we use all the time. Read more…