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The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation

Category: Adjectives and Adverbs

Hyphenation with Numbers and Units of Measure

Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2017, at 7:21 pm

Few punctuation marks prompt as much debate and discussion about when and where to place them as the hyphen does. Opinions and directives vary. GrammarBook.com aims to help define common written English that applies proper, generally accepted rules. Those guidelines likewise look to reinforce a precise and articulate use of the language. This means our …

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Words Can Be Bullies

Posted on Tuesday, February 14, 2017, at 2:03 pm

Words that start with the letter h don’t always act like it. Consider “herb,” when it means “an aromatic plant used for seasoning in cooking.” Americans dump the h, whereas many Brits pronounce it. So we say “an ’erb,” but an Englishman says “a herb.” A different sort of h-confusion happens when self-important speakers and …

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Verbal Illusions

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2017, at 7:05 pm

During a recent gubernatorial campaign, a reporter asked a local to comment on one of the candidates. The reply: “I can’t say too much good about him.” Someone reading that might conclude the statement was negative, but anyone listening knew it was just the opposite. From the way he said it, the man clearly meant, …

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You Can’t Coin What’s Already Coined

Posted on Tuesday, September 20, 2016, at 12:24 pm

Sometimes you hear statements like this: They threw him under the bus, to coin a phrase or To coin a phrase, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Those who say such things do not understand coin a phrase. You cannot coin a phrase that other people have already used. When you use phrases …

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Hyphens: We Miss Them When They’re Gone

Posted on Tuesday, August 30, 2016, at 2:33 pm

Most people ignore hyphens. Those who don’t ignore them often misuse them. “Nothing gives away the incompetent amateur more quickly than the typescript that neglects this mark of punctuation or that employs it where it is not wanted,” wrote the language scholar Wilson Follett. The writer-editor Theodore M. Bernstein was more sympathetic: “The world of …

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Small Dishes (2016)

Posted on Tuesday, July 5, 2016, at 1:07 pm

• Here is the type of sentence that makes grammar sticklers crazy: one of the students forgot to bring their lunch. You probably know this old tune: laissez-faire scholars and editors say the sentence is just fine, whereas nitpickers demand a rewrite because one is singular and their is plural. Things took a turn in …

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The Only Truth

Posted on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, at 7:50 am

A few readers took issue with the title of last week’s article, “Pronunciation Only Matters When You Speak.” They said “Only” should go after “Matters,” not before. To which we reply: ugh. “Pronunciation Matters Only When You Speak” is too stilted, too mannered. Our title places only where you usually find it: before the verb. There is …

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Pronoun Puzzlers

Posted on Tuesday, March 15, 2016, at 2:17 pm

Today let’s look into a seldom-discussed subject that’s quite a mouthful: compound possessives with nouns and pronouns. Have a look at this sentence: Cesar’s and Maribel’s houses are both lovely. Note the ’s at the end of each name. This tells us that Cesar and Maribel each own their own house. But when two people …

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Year-End Quiz 2015

Posted on Tuesday, December 15, 2015, at 2:31 pm

To close out 2015 we have put together a comprehensive pop quiz based on the year’s GrammarBook.com grammar posts. The quiz comprises twenty-five sentences that may—or may not—need fixing. Think you can fix the ones that need help? You’ll find our answers directly below the quiz. Each answer includes, for your convenience, the title and …

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You Can Say That Again

Posted on Tuesday, September 22, 2015, at 7:35 pm

Because English is so unpredictable, it’s often impossible to infer a word’s pronunciation from its spelling. Dictionaries help, to a point. But dictionaries often seem all too willing to penalize time-honored pronunciations after a word gets mispronounced by a sufficient number of people. So here is another in our series of pronunciation columns. The words …

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