Author: Mignon Fogarty

A couple of weeks ago I missed an incorrect use of the word “hung” when I was editing a Grammar Girl podcast episode that mentioned Guy Fawkes being hanged for treason — instead saying he was “hung” for treason — so today I’m going over the proper use in case I confused people. The standard quip is that curtains are hung and people are hanged. It’s not quite that cut-and-dried — some of my reference books say “hung” isn’t wrong, just less customary, when referring to past executions, and the Random House Unabridged Dictionary says that “hung” is becoming more…

Have you heard about the required order of adjectives in English? A few years ago, a paragraph from Mark Forsyth’s book “The Elements of Eloquence” that described this regular order of adjectives went viral on Twitter. The concept pops up again every year or so and blows people’s minds anew. He said, “You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you  mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” Now, I’ve loved more than one of Forsyth’s various books — in fact, I should have him on the…

which vs that To understand the difference between “which” and “that,” first you need to understand the difference between a restrictive element and a non-restrictive element, because the simple rule is to use “that” with a restrictive element and “which” with a non-restrictive element.  Restrictive Clauses and Nonrestrictive Clauses A restrictive element is just part of a sentence you can’t get rid of because it specifically restricts the noun. Here’s an example: The cupcakes that have sprinkles are still in the fridge. The words “that have sprinkles” restrict the kind of cupcake we’re talking about. Without those words, the meaning…

Today I’ll explain the difference between dashes, commas, and parentheses. Have you ever been sitting at your computer writing, and suddenly you aren’t sure whether you should use parentheses, commas, or dashes to set off some extra point or an aside? It happens to me because in a lot of cases these marks are interchangeable, at least grammatically. But they each do give your writing a different feeling. In general, you can think of parentheses, commas, and dashes as a continuum of punctuation marks. Parentheses are the quiet whisper of an aside, commas are the conversational voice of a friend…

ChatGPT and other chatbots like Claude and Gemini have seen stunningly rapid adoption in the last year or so. You probably remember all the AI-related words in our word-of-the-year episode a few months ago. And a January survey by MuckRack found that 64% of PR professionals were already using AI at work, and a more recent February survey by Pew Research Center found that even among all employed Americans, which would include people who do almost no writing or editing — even in that huge and diverse group, 20% say they’ve used ChatGPT at work. I absolutely believe it’s going…

Anabell asked, “Is it correct or incorrect to say ‘anyways’ to someone? As in ‘Anyways, call me later!’ ‘Anyways’ sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me.” Thanks, Anabell! The standard word is “anyway,” which is probably why the sound of “anyways” bothers you so much. “Anyway” has some other uses, but you’ve probably most likely heard people say it with an S in a sentence like this, where “anyway” is a way of redirecting a conversation back to the topic at hand:  Anyway, we need to get more confetti. Or maybe in a sentence like this, where “anyway” means…

If you watched the recent “Curb your Enthusiasm” finale on HBO, you may have been delighted to see the old Americanism “catawampus” playing a central role in the plot. ‘Catawampus’ on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Among all the typical quirkiness that led to Larry David being put on trial for giving a bottle of water to a voter, that voter rips him to shreds on the witness stand after hearing Larry’s manager Jeff use the word (da-da-da) “catawampus” and realizing he had earlier tricked her into revealing her secret salad dressing recipe on a phone call in which he used that…

A few weeks ago we talked about words that have changed meaning over time, like “nice” and “silly.” Another one of those words was “bully,” which in its early days, was a friendly way of addressing someone. For example, here’s a line from the “Century Dictionary,” published in the 1800s, which says it’s a way of referring to a high-spirited, dashing fellow: “I love the lovely bully.”  In that episode about changing meanings, we didn’t talk about the phrase “bully pulpit,” and a few of you asked about it, so here’s a quick follow-up: You might think the phrase refers…

If you’re into sports, entertainment, politics, the news — you encounter commentators all the time. Heck, even the spelling bee has commentators. And that word, “commentator,” has been around since the 1400s without much fuss. The verb “commentate,” though — it gets people positively riled up. Despite the uproar, “commentate” isn’t as new as you’d think. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage traces it back to the late 18th century although it really took off around 1990, if you look at a Google Ngram search.  Merriam-Webster also says that although “commentate” is widely disparaged in the United States, they “know…

A listener named Andrea once had the job title of “scriptwriter,” which spellcheck didn’t like. She said in her annual appraisal one year, her boss’s assistant accidentally selected the first option that the spellchecker suggested. Apparently, Andrea was a fabulous streetwalker. Typos, my friends, are not errors of judgment. When they’re not the result of autocorrect, they’re often the result of our fingers taking off on their own little adventures across the keyboard.  But before we figure out how to catch them, let’s laugh at them — because they can definitely be funny when you aren’t the one being embarrassed.…