Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2020, at 11:00 pm
Today we are repeating an article from January 2016 as we mourn the demise of the traditional pronunciation of the word electoral. Like many of you, we word nerds at GrammarBook.com have been surfing the TV news networks as we follow pre- and post-election coverage. We can't count the number of times we’ve heard the …
Posted on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, at 11:00 pm
Have you heard that Merriam-Webster chose the word they as the "Word of the Year"? And that it was chosen as the "Word of the Decade" by the American Dialect Society? We are not surprised. You probably recall that we ran three articles in July-August 2019 discussing the singular they (How Did They Get in …
Posted on Tuesday, December 17, 2019, at 11:00 pm
Our study of American English grammar and style sometimes gathers bits too small to feature yet worthy to gather for group exploration. In 2018, we discussed such medleys twice: Exploring Some English Miscellany More Mulling Over Miscellany This year we've continued tracking items of note that we receive from our readers. Let's look at several …
Posted on Tuesday, October 8, 2019, at 11:00 pm
It has been a while since our last pronunciation column, so here's another group of familiar words whose traditional pronunciations may surprise you. (Note: capital letters denote a stressed syllable.) Antarctica Like the elusive first r in February, the first c in this word is often carelessly dropped: it's ant-ARC-tica, not ant-AR-tica. Err Since to err is to make an error, …
Posted on Tuesday, July 16, 2019, at 11:00 pm
Last month we reran More Ear-itating Word Abuse by our late writer Tom Stern. The article first appeared in August 2013. We heard from many readers, and their comments were just about evenly split between: For years I've hated hearing people mispronounce these words. Thank you for shining a spotlight on this subject. and You …
