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 listener named Milton asked why Australians use the present perfect tense for the past tense. For example, he said Australians would say, “He has skulked,” instead of “He skulked.” That’s the present perfect tense: the verb “has” or “have” combined with the past participle: “has skulked.” And somewhat confusingly, even though it’s called the “present perfect” tense, it’s usually used to talk about something that happened at an unspecified time in the past. I’ve spent significant time with a few Australians over the years—my lab mate in grad school was from Adelaide, and a good friend is married to…
It is I, Grammar Girl, here to help you understand when to use the words “I” and “me.” A listener named Jodie wanted to know which is correct: “It is I” or “It is me.” She says that when she answers the phone and the person asks, “Is Jodie there?” she usually responds by saying, “This is she.” But one of her friends says this is incorrect, and now they have a $5 bet on the question. The short answer is that Jodie wins. The traditional grammar rule states when a pronoun follows a linking verb, such as “is,” the pronoun should…
You didn’t realize it at the time, but last week was part I of apostrophes, and today is part II. Today’s topic is tough apostrophe issues. How Do You Make Singular Words Ending in S Possessive? I said it in the last episode about apostrophes, and I’ll say it again: there are some confusing situations when it comes to apostrophes. For example, Christine, from Portland, Oregon; Judy from Traverse City, Michigan; Katy from Australia; Kristi from Washington, D.C.; and Rick from Las Vegas, Nevada, all asked how to make a singular word that ends in S possessive. I know that this is a raging…
When I was in second grade, I lost a spelling bee because I misspelled the word “its.” I put an apostrophe in when I shouldn’t have, and it was a traumatic moment in my young life. But I think this lesson is burned into my mind precisely because of my past misdeeds, and although I can’t change my past, I feel the next best thing would be to save all of you from similar apostrophe-induced horrors. What Is the Purpose of an Apostrophe? Apostrophes have two main uses in the English language: They stand in for something that’s missing, and they…
In the recent episode about vacation words, we said that you write the abbreviation for “rest and relaxation” with an ampersand—“R&R”—and I thought some of you might want more information about the ampersand because it’s an odd little symbol that used to be part of the alphabet, and it also turns out that its name is something of a mondegreen, a word based on a misunderstand or mishearing. The History of the Ampersand Nobody knows who invented the ampersand, according to Keith Houston, who writes the Shady Characters website about punctuation and symbols and has published a book by the…
This is one of a few questions I got about mondegreens after I mentioned them in a recent episode about the poop emoji. “Hi, Mignon. This is J.T. Morris from Evergreen, Texas. I’m a huge fan of Grammar Girl, and I just listened to the episode today in which you had a segment about an eggcorn related to the poop emoji. It was the word “holy” and the proper spelling of that in relation to that text. In listening to that segment, I realized I think I have been misusing the word “mondegreen.” I always assumed that what you referred…
Here’s an interesting question from a Grammar Girl podcast listener: “Hey, Grammar Girl. I have what I think is a familect story, but it could be just a local idiom. I’m not really sure at this point. I grew up in Eastern Ohio where we have a really odd dialect, but my family growing up always used the word ‘mango’ to mean a green pepper. So I didn’t know that mangoes were a fruit and a tropical fruit at that. Well, fast forward two years later when my nephew was having his first birthday party, and my husband and I…
A few months ago in a Slack channel for podcasters, one of my friends posted a grammar gripe. He wrote, This grammar pet peeve has been bugging me a lot lately because I’ve seen it used in very prominent places: “all of a sudden …” It’s supposed to be “all of _the_ sudden,” but simply saying, “suddenly” sounds a whole lot more grown up. It was interesting because he had it backwards. “All of a sudden” is the right way to say it, but when he heard it that way, apparently it bugged him. I’ve occasionally gotten questions about the…
A listener named Paul posted this kindly worded comment on Facebook. He wrote, “Mignon, I love your podcast. I have listened to every single episode. I love your sense of humor, and I love your pleasant speaking voice – except for one thing. Would you please, please, pretty please with sugar on top, stop mispronouncing the word “forward”? You almost always pronounce it “foe word” instead of the correct “fore word.” You have done it for years and years … If this is some regional variation of the word, then I apologize, but I have never heard anyone else pronounce…
A lot of people get confused about when to use hyphens when writing ages, and I think it’s because sometimes an age is a noun, sometimes an age is an adjective that comes before a noun and modifies it, and sometimes an age is an adjective that comes after a noun. When to Hyphenate Ages First we’ll talk about when you do hyphenate an age: You do it when the age is acting like a noun and when the age is an adjective that comes before the noun and modifies the noun. In this example, the age—70-year-old—is used as a…