Month: October 2016

The NPR announcer who mentioned “still-hot embers” failed to understand the meaning of “embers.”

There’s no excuse for anyone who graduated from high school and writes professionally to confuse the words “epitaph” and “epithet.” If at no other time, they would have learned the meaning of “epitaph” when they studied Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in high school.

According to the way it’s pronounced, the shortened form of “microphone” belongs to the same category as words like “bike,” “hike,” “like,” and “pike” when it is written. That is to say, it should be spelled “mike,” not “mic.”