It’s a grammatical question that trips up even the best writers sometimes: Is it who or whom? A physician says he likes the sentiment in a colleague’s email signature, but he’s not sure it’s 100% grammatical. The sentence:...
In this week’s installment of “Slang This!,” Grant and Martha are joined by June Casagrande, author of Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get you Clobbered by the Grammar Snobs — Even If You’re Right. June...
Is it ever okay to end a sentence with a preposition? Oh, is it ever! Martha and Grant do their best to bury this tired old proscription. It’s a baseless rule concocted by 17-century grammarians, and it’s errant nonsense up with which...
Ahoy, mateys, and welcome aboard another newsletter from A Way with Words! We are delighted to welcome our new listeners from KTOO in Juneau, Alaska, and WCAI, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The smell of leather-bound books and printer's ink is...
A native speaker of Spanish has a hard time with prepositions in English. Why do we say that someone’s “on my mind” but “in my heart”? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “On My Mind and In My...
POSH n.— «POsH: Plain Old semantic HTML.…I think POsH suggests more than just the semantics/structure inherent in xhtml, but not (yet, perhaps) a µf.» —“IRC Log for #microformats on 2007-04-06″ by...