Maeve’s new collection of essays, WORD RAGE, covers most of the topics that spark heated online “grammar” debates and interfere with true communication.
Category: English Usage
The Difference Between “Advise” and “Advice”
If you’re selling, spelling counts. People who write for a living have no excuse to misuse ordinary English usage.
Beware of “Whom” with Parenthetical Expressions
This morning the following caption appeared in a Democrat-Gazette article about a bank robbery: Springdale police are searching for this man whom they say robbed an Arvest Bank branch Thursday. The error with whom in this caption is common in sentences that contain a parenthetical phrase or clause: a group of words thrown into another…
What Makes A Word “Fancy”?
If dossier is a “fancy French word,” wouldn’t imprimatur be a “fancy Latin word”?