Most of us use phrases such as “if I were you,” “if need be,” “be that as it may,” “God bless you,” “far be it from me,” and so on—but few of us are aware that we are employing the subjunctive mood when we do so. This lack of awareness is not surprising given...
If you receive a paycheck on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month, are you paid bimonthly or semimonthly? If a newspaper is published every two weeks, it is a biweekly or a semimonthly publication? The answer is not simple. If we check Webster’s for definitions...
Each year, as the festive season approaches and people make plans to send holiday greetings, many of us would benefit from a reminder about how to make last names plural. (Hint: Apostrophes need not apply.) If we pause to think, we will likely remember that...
Many of my posts include a quiz introduced by some form of the question “Which of the following sentences are problematic?” More than one subscriber has written to suggest that in this opening question, the plural verb are should instead be the singular verb is. That...
This site addresses a number of punctuation issues, including punctuating with quotation marks, choosing between parentheses and dashes, using the semicolon and colon, and deciding when to use the Oxford comma. Here we are focusing specifically on punctuating with...
