January 6, 2025
Punctuation marks don’t just exist to end sentences. They have a whole range of jobs, like introducing quotations, marking transitions mid-sentence, and connecting compound words. Another one of their many jobs is to REPLACE missing letters or words, and this 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…
December 5, 2024
I’m back to disprove yet another grammar myth. We’ve talked about avoiding contractions, putting two spaces after a period, ending a sentence with a preposition, and splitting infinitives. Now it’s time to tackle yet another “rule” that is actually complete Read more…
Has a teacher ever told you that you should never use contractions in formal or professional writing? Maybe you got an essay back with all the don’ts and I’ms scribbled out and replaced with do nots and I ams. I’ve Read more…
November 12, 2024
Which is correct: “It happened like I said it would” or “It happened as I said it would”? What about these: “It tasted like garbage” or “It tasted as garbage”? If you picked the sentence with like in it both Read more…
Then and than are just one letter away from being the exact same word, but that one tiny letter makes a world of difference! Despite the words’ similarity in spelling, they have completely different definitions and are absolutely NOT interchangeable. Read more…
November 5, 2024
It might seem like English is a pretty well-established language, but new words are being made up all the time! If a new kind of technology is invented, its name needs to go in the dictionary. When new slang words Read more…
Most words have antonyms, which are “opposite” words. For example, the antonym of good is bad. An antonym of sad is happy. Then there are these super CONFUSING words called contronyms. These words are their OWN antonyms; they mean both Read more…
November 4, 2024
There are some English words that people absolutely HATE, like moist or fester. Other words sound very pretty—even magical—like effervescent. Then there are the very satisfying, perfectly symmetrical words that are so special, they get their own name: palindromes. What Read more…
October 29, 2024
Doesn’t that just title sum up English grammar? “Here’s a rule, but it’s not quite always true…” It’s an unfortunate reality that the rules of English grammar are very much like swiss cheese: full of holes (and possibly a little Read more…