The latest from your experts.
If you want…..
….an easy-to-follow course in Dog 101, pick up The Dog Trainer’s Complete Guide to a Happy, Well-Behaved Pet by Jolanta Benal
….a primer on 101 words that will expand your vocabulary and make you sound more sophisticated, pick up Grammar Girl’s 101 Words to Sound Smart by Mignon Fogarty
….a hilarious (yet entirely accurate) take on proper grammar, pick up The Elements of F*cking Style by Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen
by Grammar Girl
Allegra Young asked, “What’s your take on the apostrophe in ‘Hallowe’en’? To use or not to use?”
via Cayuse/Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
One early spelling of Halloween was all hallows’ even, in which even meant “evening.” The all and s got dropped, hallows’ and even became a closed compound, and the apostrophe took the place of the v, giving us Hallowe’en—just one of many transitional spellings along the way to Halloween, which the Oxford English Dictionary shows as first appearing in 1786. Other spellings before Halloween included Hallow-e’en, Alhollon Eue, and Halhalon evyn.
You can certainly use Hallowe’en if you want an 18th-century feel for your party invitations or decorations. Continue reading ‘Why Is There an Apostrophe in “Hallowe’en”?’
By Grammar Girl
The World Series has fans asking how to make an abbreviation such as RBI plural. It can be confusing, since it’s the R-part (run) that is becoming plural. Should it be RsBI or RBIs or something else?
Even though it doesn’t make absolute logical sense, you make initialisms and acronyms plural by adding an s to the end no matter what part would be plural if you wrote the whole thing out: even though it would be runs batted in, you write it RBIs.
Can You Ever Use an Apostrophe?
In the past, some publications used apostrophes to make acronyms and abbreviations plural, so until a few years ago, it was common to see something like RBI’s or CD’s in the New York Times. Currently, all major publications and style guides I’m aware of recommend simply adding an s (without an apostrophe).
When Do You Use Periods? Continue reading ‘How Do You Make “RBI” Plural?’
By Grammar Girl
You need the “from.” Saying that you “graduated college” is wrong, wrong, WRONG. And it makes you look a bit lowbrow to people in a position to judge you.
Here’s why:
When you say that someone graduated from a specific college you are using the intransitive form of “to graduate” because the verb has no object. Although archaic, the formal way to say this using the intransitive form of the verb “to graduate” is “was graduated from.” The more modern way to say it and still be correct is, for example, “Alp graduated from Brown.” You need the “from.”
Alp graduated FROM Brown. The shortest form of this sentence would be “Alp graduated.” If you think about it that way, you can see that “from Brown” isn’t an object, it’s just a prepositional phrase.
Alp graduated from Brown University (via thurdl01/Flickr).
The thing is, when you say, “Alp graduated Brown,” you’ve turned “to graduate” into a transitive verb. By definition, the act of graduating is something a school does to a student, not something a student does to a school. Schools graduate students. You could say that Brown graduated 600 students this year. However, if you say, “Alp graduated Brown,” you’re making Alp the subject and Brown the object and saying that Alp did something to the college
A whopping two-thirds of Google hits for “graduated” come up in the wrong formulation.
By Grammar Girl
I’ve always been fascinated by the Académie Française, a French academy established in 1635 that tries to defend the French language. I wrote about them in The Grammar Devotional, in part because it cracks me up that they call their 40 members “immortals” and in part because regulating language seems like an almost impossible task.
Credit: opalsson/3162683732 @ Flickr
“E-mail.” Bad. “Courriel.” Good.
The past stories I’ve read seemed to have focused on the immortals’ condemnation of technology-related English words that were seeping into France such as “e-mail” (they recommend “courriel”) and “software” (they recommend “logiciel”), but this week the Académie Française launched a new section on its website for hated Anglicisms, and the first two words aren’t technological words.
New Hated Anglicisms
Their first two targets are “le best of” and “impacter.” According to the Telegraph, “impacter” is a Frenchified version of the verb “to impact.” The Académie Française site recommends the French version of “affect” instead, and in this case, the body is aligned with some English usage guides which call “impact” as a verb business jargon and recommend “affect” instead.
The immortals intend to add new words to their English blacklist every month.
An English Version of the French Academy?
Continue reading ‘French Academy Tries to Ban English Words (Again)’
By Grammar Girl
You see them at all the grocery stores this time of year: bottles of apple cider. So imagine my surprise when I read in Garner’s Modern American Usage that “apple cider” is technically redundant. Cider is defined as “juice pressed from apples.” It comes from the Late Latin word for “strong drink.”
“Apple cider” is an example of marketing influencing the language. Some drink makers call juice from other fruits cider (e.g., blueberry cider, cherry cider), so some manufacturers who make traditional cider feel the need to point out that their juice is from apples.
“Apple cider” now joins “chai tea” (which technically means “tea tea,” since “chai” is the Hindi word for “tea”) as a phrase that is technically redundant, but often needed so consumers understand what they’re buying.
UPDATE: Ngram graph added 10/14/2011:
Mignon Fogarty is the author of Grammar Girl’s 101 Misused Words You’ll Never Confuse Again. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
by Grammar Girl
Why do people say they could care less when, logically, they mean they couldn’t care less?
In the early 1990s, the well-known Harvard linguist Stephen Pinker argued that the way most people say could care less — the way they emphasize the words — implies they are being ironic or sarcastic. Other linguists have argued that the type of sound at the end of couldn’t is naturally dropped by sloppy or slurring speakers.*
Regardless of the reason people say they could care less, it is one of the more common language peeves because of its illogical nature. People often call in about the error when I’m a guest on radio shows. To say you could care less means you have a bit of caring left, which is not what the speakers seem to intend. The proper couldn’t care less is still the dominant form in print, but a Google Ngram search shows could care less has been steadily gaining ground since its appearance in the 1960s:
Stick with couldn’t care less if you don’t want to irritate people. As Michael Quinion says on his World Wide Words blog, sarcasm “loses its force when put on paper and just ends up looking stupid.”
*The Garner’s Modern American Usage entry cites a 1973 article by Atcheson L. Hench in the journal American Speech.
Mignon Fogarty is the author of Grammar Girl’s 101 Misused Words You’ll Never Confuse Again. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
by Grammar Girl
At the 24-second mark in this Mercedes commercial (after some stunning images), a man informs us that the car has “less doors.”
There are times when “less” may be appropriate with a count noun (for example, some people think “one less [count noun]” works, and I’ve seen more than one grammarian defend “10 items or less” signs), but the Mercedes commercial is not one of these times. It’s not an idiom and “doors” has no underlying sense of being a mass noun. In simple cases in which you’re choosing between “less” and “fewer,” “fewer” is for count nouns (like “M&Ms,” “doors,” and “forks”), and “less” is for mass nouns (such as “water,” “furniture,” and “homework”).
Mignon Fogarty is the author of Grammar Girl’s 101 Words Every High School Graduate Needs to Know.
by Grammar Girl
The Quick and Dirty:
“Comprise” means “to contain” or, less frequently, “to include,” with the whole preceding the parts in the sentence order (e.g. “America comprises 50 states”).
“Compose” means “to make up” and the parts come before the whole in the sentence order (e.g. “Many ethnic groups compose our nation”).
America "comprises" 50 states, but license plates "compose" this map. via Kevin Hutchinson/flickr
But what about if we want to say that something “is composed of” or “is comprised of” something else? Is one more right than the other? Short answer: Yes! You can’t use the passive voice with “comprise,” so you must say that something “comprises” something else. It’s fine, on the other hand, to say that this blog, for instance, “is composed of” many different voices.
If you forget this tip, you can always just say “makes up” or “made up of” instead and sidestep the grammar confusion.
That’s all for now!
