Q&Q Omni Category: Watch Your Language / Grammar girl
The most recent 250 items in this category are below. To find something specific, please use the search box.
What's in a new name?
Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine streets lined with dilapidated, decaying Victorian houses. The gutters are filled with shards of brown glass, shattered remnants of... Read the rest »
Tricky questions of tone
Saintly, but not sanctimonious. Fun, but not flippant. Populist, but never pandering. Those are the qualities that shine through in my writing. Or so I... Read the rest »
Watch Your Language: The secret minds of animals
Fans of the old Flipper TV show may recall a standard event from each episode. At some key moment, Flipper, a dolphin who was clever... Read the rest »
Spellbound
Everyone agrees that English spelling makes no sense. Think of all those weird inconsistencies. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently (threw and... Read the rest »
Solid waste happens
Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re hanging a picture. You have a hammer in one hand. In the other, a nail. You swing the... Read the rest »
Watch Your Language: Politico’s corner
Can anything else on Earth compare with it? The speed, the teamwork, the virtuoso displays of skill interspersed with regular outbursts of insane violence? Yup,... Read the rest »
Watch Your Language: Voices from the past
Yondah lies da castle of my faddah, da king.” Who could ever forget those classic words uttered by Tony Curtis in the 1954... Read the rest »
Finer Points: Imported Slang
This past September, Paul Wells was complaining in his Maclean’s blog, Inkless Wells, that CBC Newsworld wasn’t going to cover what would probably be Tony... Read the rest »
Finer Points: Rock talk
“Open the map and I’ll show you where you’re to.” I’m still not quite sure if our cab driver meant to in the sense of... Read the rest »
Finer Points: Name that decade
Driving along Highway 401 recently, somewhere between Toronto and Montreal, we tuned in a local radio station. I can’t really define its format, but it... Read the rest »
We want candy!: The evolution of a Halloween chant
Every Halloween, I remember with a pang that when I was a child we went shellouting, and now the word doesn’t exist, not even... Read the rest »
Comma clerk killers
A writer I know says darkly, “Copy editors are the enemy.” Well, I’m here to defend good editing, but there is always the other kind.... Read the rest »
Laying it on the line: The essential difference between lie and lay
A grammatical concept I was never introduced to in school is that of the non-count noun. The term was invented in 1952, as another name... Read the rest »
On the rocks, with no stone unturned: The subtle differences between idiom and cliche
Everyone hates clichés. The trouble is, one writer’s hackneyed clunker is another’s pithy idiom, and a definition is hard to agree on. Burchfield’s Fowler has... Read the rest »
Who's this Ida, anyway?: If I would have known it was the plupluperfect, I never woulda said it
Plupluperfect According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage this term was first used in 1986 in the pages of a British language-fanciers’ magazine called... Read the rest »
The number game
I am one of those purists who believe that - wait a minute, shouldn't that be "believes?" Well, actually no, it shouldn't, but you're... Read the rest »
An open-and-shut case
Here’s a boring little word: case. Meaning, of course, a little box. Or a big box. That sense comes from the Latin capsa, a receptacle;... Read the rest »
Headfirst into wrack and ruin: Avoiding a word you may never need
There are words that are sometimes used not for their real meaning, but for their power to impart a certain tone to a sentence. Comprise,... Read the rest »
The vernacular is on the move
A writing teacher of my acquaintance complained to me recently that characters in her students' scenes often snap at each other, "If you think blah... Read the rest »
New Latin to Old English
It’s too bad Latin has fallen off the curriculum in Canadian schools, if only because we are all still in the habit of flinging around... Read the rest »
In search of a few yuks
In an article this past fall about a new cable television channel devoted to comedy, a journalist mentioned "Aristophenes [sic], Goldsmith, Shaw, and other classic... Read the rest »
Maybes and might-have-beens
Usage guides published before 1980 or so don’t even mention it, and the authors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) call it “mysterious”... Read the rest »
Back and forth and back again: An antique phrase makes a political comeback
Funny how a word can fall into disuse, spend centuries stored in the attic of language, and suddenly come back as a new and stylish... Read the rest »
From ridicule to respectability: You've come a long way, guy
Are you a man or a guy? I ask, because this very basic self-definition seems to have changed over the last decade or two. Where... Read the rest »
RSS feed
twitter
facebook
rss
podcast
Recent comments