You know what I love about my friends? They know I’m a word nerd and they still talk to me and even feed me potential cases for Which Word Wednesday. I am one blessed gal. This week’s entry of preventative and preventive comes from friend Melisa. Her inquiry sent me…
Lynne Truss—author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves—compares herself to the little boy from The Sixth Sense. She says that instead of seeing dead people, she sees dead language. I can also see dead language. I also see lifeless punctuation. It’s the little things that make my ears itch, like the…
In our society, choices abound. We can choose from 10 kinds of cheddar cheese and 85,000 different coffee combinations from Starbucks (supposedly). We want things made-to-order and made-for-me. It’s the American way. But what happens when that mentality is applied to language? That’s when we get American English. Take this…
Some of us have pets, and most of us have pet peeves, but everyone has pet words—whether you know it or not. My pet words come to me like strays. I could be minding my own daily grind when a word cozies up to me. Before I know it, I’m…
My creative-writer side sometimes battles with my stickler-grammarian side. The creative-writer wants to coin new words and phrases—this side of me wants to create new rules or bend the ones that already exist. The stickler-grammarian wants to follow the tried and true Chicago Manual of Style—this side of me wants…
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