by Ron Cooper | Aug 15, 2024
We humans are notorious for butchering our native tongue in strange and often humorous ways. But did you know there are terms for some of those linguistic faux pas? Let’s take a look at a few kinds of misheard and misused expressions: Malapropisms A malapropism is...
by Nancy Tuten | May 27, 2023
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...
by Nancy Tuten | Aug 14, 2022
The following sentences offer a choice between anxious and eager. Which word is more accurate in each case? Our children are (anxious/eager) to go to Disney World, but my husband and I are (anxious/eager) about the cost of the trip. Having heard on the morning news...
by Nancy Tuten | Jul 12, 2022
When we’re feeling healthy and happy, should we say we feel good or we feel well? The short answer is that either is fine, but we need to take a deeper dive if we want to use good and well appropriately in other contexts, too. Many of us were taught the partial truth...
by Nancy Tuten | Jun 29, 2022
Editors at Merriam-Webster (M-W) caused quite a stir when they tweeted on September 17, 2019, that the nonbinary pronoun they had been added to the dictionary. Their tweet addresses a question I still hear frequently, even three years later: can they (or them or...
by Nancy Tuten | Jun 4, 2022
Three issues often arise during graduation season. One concerns the verb to graduate. Another concerns the need for apostrophes in the expressions associate’s degree, master’s degree, and bachelor’s degree. And the third issue concerns which programs...
