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.
A few years ago, a man named D. Chap wrote in and said, “I was thinking about the words dreamed and dreamt. I’ve heard it used both ways and I’ve seen it written both ways, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me about what the proper usage would be if there is one. You don’t say creamt when you’re trying to say creamed, or the same thing with gleamed and gleamt; you never hear those. So I was wondering what the proper usage was for dreamed versus dreamt.” The reason he is confused is that dreamed and…
Typeface Versus Font First, we have to talk about the difference between a typeface and a font, because what we’re really talking about here is the names of typefaces. Think of it this way: the font is a small part of a typeface. If we’re talking about Times New Roman, Times New Roman 12 point bold italic is the font, and the typeface is the collection of all the fonts that make up the entire Times New Roman set. Today, however, many people think of letter styles as fonts because it’s the word you see on all your software…
Mark E. from Portland, Oregon said he regularly comes across the phrase chomping at the bit, but he believes it should be champing at the bit. The original phrase is, indeed, champing at the bit, but chomping at the bit emerged in America in the 1930s according to the Oxford English Dictionary and chomp has overtaken champ in common use. A Google web search for chomping at the bit returns about twice as many results as a search for champing at the bit. Champing at the bit is still used just slightly more often than chomping at the bit in…
A couple of weeks ago, after I talked about how the pronoun you fills so many roles, I started wondering why we stopped using thee and thou. It turns out that English used to have formal and informal pronouns like many other languages. German has Sie and du, French has vous and tu, Spanish has usted and tú, and during Shakespeare’s time, English had thou and you and thee and you. Thee and Thou Were English’s Informal Pronouns Since thee and thou have survived mainly in religious and poetic writing, you may be surprised to learn that thee and thou…
Many listeners have asked about the origin, meaning, and appropriateness of Xmas, the abbreviation for Christmas. Retailers have long been accused of secularizing Christmas by using Xmas in signs and advertisements; therefore, I suspect many of you will be surprised to learn that Xmas has a religious origin. In Greek, the letter chi is written as an X, and chi is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ. Greeks sometimes abbreviated Christ as X, and around 300 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine I started using the symbol XP to symbolize Christ. In that use, XP stands for the…
Today, we’re going to talk about the pronouns I and me and the phrase between you and me. In their song “You and I,” One Direction gets the first part right and the second part wrong just a few lines apart. Here’s the early line (at 0:57 in the video): You and I, we don’t want to be like them. It may sound a little grammatically weird because with the You and I followed by a pause and then we, they’re doing a double-subject thing I talked about in a previous show, but that’s OK, and they get the…
Sometimes people think that it’s wrong to pronounce zero as “oh,” but it’s actually OK in certain contexts. For example, it’s fine—even normal—to say “oh” when you’re reading a series of numbers such as A zip code (90210) A room number (room 404) A phone number (555-206-1234) A credit card number (1024 5026 9046 8065) Of course, we can’t forget agent designations: James Bond (Agent 007). You pronounce it “zero” when you are talking about math or science. For example, you would say “five minus zero equals five” or that the temperature is “below zero.” Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
A vaccine is the fluid they inject into you or the aerosol you inhale; it's the preparation of an inactivated microbe or virus that stimulates an immune response that helps protect you from disease. For example, a nurse could say, "The vaccine arrived yesterday." Picture a tube of liquid. A vaccination is the shot you get. It’s the introduction of the vaccine into your body. You get a vaccination when someone administers the vaccine to you. A nurse could say, “We can start giving vaccinations now,” or “We run a vaccination clinic.” In rare cases, the word 'vaccine' can refer…
Steve M. from Springfield, Missouri, wrote, "[What are your] thoughts on the difference between using 'systemic' and 'systematic'?" Both words come from the same root word, “system,” which we get from an ancient Greek word that described an organized whole that is made up of multiple parts, and it could apply to many things. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary gives examples that include a group of men but also a group of connected verses. ‘Systematic’ “Systematic” is the much older of the two words and the more common word. It arose in English in the 1670s, and it describes something…
My cousin Pam, who's a teacher, sent me a link to an amazing YouTube video, called the Lost Generation which was created for an AARP contest. What makes the poem so interesting is that it makes sense forward and backward but means opposite things. For example here are the last three lines read forward. My generation is apathetic and lethargic It is foolish to presume that There is hope. Pretty negative, right? But when you read it starting at the end and working toward the beginning, it means something very positive. There is hope. It is foolish to presume that…