Author: Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty is the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips and the author of seven books on language, including the New York Times bestseller "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." She is an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame, and the show is a five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. She has appeared as a guest expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today Show. Her popular LinkedIn Learning courses help people write better to communicate better. Find her on Mastodon.
I used to be a terrible cook. One problem was that I would get distracted and end up burning things a lot, but in such cases, should I say dinner is burned or should I say it’s burnt? Why do we have two forms of that word? The Verb: ‘Burned’ Versus ‘Burnt’ Burned and burnt are both acceptable past-tense forms of the verb to burn, but which one you use depends on where you live because the verb burned is the much more common form in the United States and Canada. Burned and burnt are used more interchangeably as a…
In last week’s podcast, we talked about how Captain R.F. Scott’s sick ponies might have been a harbinger of the disastrous ending to their expedition, and I started thinking about the word harbinger. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t place the root or put it in a group of related words. Well, it turns out that harbinger comes from Old French and Old German words that meant “to provide shelter or lodging” and later had a sense of someone being sent ahead to arrange accommodations, and in that sense, it is related to the word harbor, as in…
Most sources say that the correct past tense is pleaded. Squiggly pleaded guilty. That dirty rotten scoundrel. Garner’s Modern American Usage, the AP Stylebook, and the Chicago Manual of Style all say to use pleaded. You should also use pleaded as the participle, as in Squiggly has pleaded guilty. Some people do prefer pled, and the AP Stylebook calls it a colloquial past-tense form. Nevertheless, most lawyers use pleaded. For example, in a 2013 ABA Journal post, a senior litigation associate named Brian Boone reported doing a Westlaw search and finding that “the U.S. Supreme court has used pleaded in…
When not only is followed by but also (or simply but), it’s considered good form to make sure the parts that follow each set of words are formatted the same way. Examples of ‘Not Only But Also’ For example, this sentence is good because it uses two noun phrases: Aardvark is not only a great fisherman but also a great friend. A great fisherman is a noun phrase and it follows not only, and a great friend is a noun phrase and it follows but also. Keep It Parallel Sometimes people write sentences like this, in which the parts aren’t…
Capital "Capital" refers a city that is the seat of government for its region or is important in some way. It has other meanings, too. A capital is an uppercase letter. Capital is wealth or money, especially in the context of business: Squiggly needs capital to get his hot chocolate stand up and running. "Capital" can also mean “particular or significant”: It is of capital importance that we arrive early so don’t end up in the back. And it can mean “fabulous”: Bringing songs to sing on the bus? That's a capital idea! And of course, we have capital crimes…
This week’s Radiolab podcast was about a strange Olympic badminton match in which both teams were trying to lose instead of trying to win. It was a great story, but at the beginning, Mike Pesca made a big deal about how the game is badminton, not badmitten as many people say, as though you’re scolding a cat. Bad Mitten! I am certainly one of those people who’ve been saying it wrong my whole life, so I was happy to learn the right way, but if you know me, by now you know that I also wanted to know WHY it has…
When you get closer to finding a difficult truth or finding a hiding criminal, you home in on them, just as a homing device allows you to find something. ‘Home In’ Put an image in your mind of a homing pigeon arriving home to a lovely enclosure on top of a grand castle like the Windsor Castle or the Tower of London to remember that you home in on something. A castle would be a great home, as long as it had modern heating and plumbing and wasn’t so big that you’d feel lonely. And you don’t want it to…
In a previous Grammar Girl post, I talked about using while to mean although, but another point about “while” can confound people: What is the difference between “a while” and “awhile”? “A while” describes a time, a noun. The article “a” before “while” is a sure sign that you’re dealing with a noun. Notice in the following sentence that you could replace “a while” with another article-noun combination such as “a year”: It’s been a while since Squiggly tried marmite. It’s been a year since Squiggly tried marmite. Both of those sentences describe a length of time: “a while” is more general and “a year” is more specific, but they’re both a…
Cemetery is the much older word, going back to Roman times. Today, a cemetery refers to a large burial ground, typically not associated with a church. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for graveyard comes from 1767, and a graveyard is typically smaller than a cemetery and is often associated with a church. It is part of the churchyard. Cemetery appears to be the more commonly used word today, perhaps because it’s been around longer, perhaps because people like the sound of it better, or perhaps because there are so many more people buried in cemeteries because they’re…
Capitalizing job titles can be tricky because they aren’t always capitalized, but it seems like a lot of people want to see their title capitalized whether it should be or not. I’m talking about job titles such as vice president, sales director, chairperson, mayor, and emperor. In general, titles that come before names are capitalized, and titles that come after names are lowercase. The thing you have to figure out is whether the word is part of an official title (in which case it is capitalized) or just describing someone's role (in which case it is lowercase). For example, let’s…