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.
First, we had Nancy Pelosi taking over as Speaker of the House, then Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee, and now Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. So the question of word choice is rising again—Is Hillary Clinton the first female presidential nominee from a major party or the first woman nominee? Sexism Before I answer the question, I want to address a related issue, which is that sometimes it’s sexist to point out people’s sex because doing so implies that they aren’t in their proper role. For example, saying someone is a male nurse or…
Today we’re going to talk about the difference between the words between and among. You may have noticed that I said we are going to talk about the difference “between” the words between and among. I used the word between because I was talking about a choice that involves two distinct words. Many people believe between should be used for choices involving two items and among for choices that involve more than two items. That can get you to the right answer some of the time, but it’s not that simple (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Here’s the deal: You…
People sometimes ask about the difference between among and amongst. Both words mean the same thing, but among is the older form and is now more commonly used in the United States, whereas amongst is more commonly used in Britain. For example, Google’s Ngram viewer suggests the word “amongst” appeared far more frequently in literature in the early 1600s. Among and amongst waged war between book covers for decades until around 1690, after which among grew to become the more popular form of the word. (In literature, at least.) The Origin of ‘Among’ and ‘Amongst’ Among and amongst are both extremely old…
A listener named Alan wrote, “When using the word versus, does it make a difference as to what is placed before and what is placed after? For example: Roe versus Wade or Red Sox versus Yankees. In other words, by rule is one the challenger, and the other the challenged?” Plaintiff v. Defendant Well, Alan, the court case part is easy. The standard format is Plaintiff v. Defendant. The plaintiff is the person or entity who is doing the suing, the one who makes the complaint, the one who brings the lawsuit. The defendant is the person or entity that…
Today’s topic is the subjunctive, or in terms you might recognize, when to use “I was” and when to use “I were.” Was Versus Were Carrie from New Orleans asked me to help her understand whether she should say “I wish I were more perceptive” or “I wish I was more perceptive.” It’s a great question because it’s something that a lot of people don’t know. Believe it or not, verbs have moods just like you do. Yes, before the Internet and before emoji, somebody already thought it was important to communicate moods. So, like many other languages, English has…
Phrases and clauses are both groups of words that work together in a sentence. The difference is that a clause has a subject and a verb—often, a clause could be a sentence if it were all by itself, and when it could be, we call it a main clause or an independent clause. Zombies hunt the surviving humans. [main clause] A phrase, on the other hand, is missing something. Phrases work within sentences. There are prepositional phrases, noun phrases, and so on. Phrases can play a lot of different roles in a sentence, but they work with main clauses. Somewhere,…
What’s the Trouble? People find “pair” confusing. Is it singular or plural? A pair is two of something, but a pair can be singular or plural—it’s one of those odd English nouns (like “couple”) that can be singular or plural depending on how you’re thinking of the people or items in question. For example, if you have two similar dogs entered in a dog show by the same owner, you might say something like “The pair of schnauzers were entered by Hanz Finkelstein,” treating “pair” as plural (the pair were entered) because they are two distinct dogs. On the other…
Here’s a question for you: When you hear reindeer clattering on your roof, are you hearing their hoofs (H-O-O-F-S) or their hooves (H-O-O-V-E-S)? Regular and Irregular Plurals Nouns that take an S or ES to become plural are called regular nouns and nouns that become plural some other way are called irregular nouns. So hoofs is a regular plural and hooves is an irregular plural. Drifting Toward Regularity Usually, if a spelling changes, it’s in the direction of the word becoming regular. For example, the plural of the word brother used to be irregular (brethren), but now it’s usually…
Today’s topic is how to treat URLs when you have to use them in text. Web addresses are strange beasts; they seem more like equations or long numbers than words. All the rules for how to handle uniform resource locators (or URLs) in documents are matters of style, but some styles make more sense than others. URLs and Terminal Punctuation URLs always have internal periods and often are scattered with other punctuation marks and symbols such as question marks, slashes, and percent signs. So what do you do when one shows up at the end of a sentence? Should you…
Last week, when I was writing about whether you should use italics or quotation marks for internal dialogue, I was reminded that people sometimes aren’t sure how to spell the word. Is it D-I-A-L-O-G-U-E or simply D-I-A-L-O-G? I see both, and I even had a writer alternate between the two in a recent draft I was editing. I had to fix that! ‘Dialog’ and ‘Dialogue’ in British English ‘Dialog’ and ‘Dialogue’ in American English The shorter spelling started spiking in the early 1980s, especially in American English, and in many cases it’s used when people are writing about computers—for example, when…