Author: Rob Reinalda
Rob Reinalda
Rob Reinalda, winner of ACES' 2019 Robinson Prize for excellence in editing, is the founder and principal of Word Czar Media. He is the author of "Why Editors Drink."
Today’s topic is “ain’t” and a few other troublesome contractions. To quote the famous opening lines of the first-ever talking picture, The Jazz Singer: “Wait a minute, wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” You may have been chided—or at least corrected—for using this slang contraction, but do you know how “ain’t” came to be and when it’s OK to use it? Review of Contractions You’ll recall that when two words are pushed together and at least one letter is removed and replaced by an apostrophe, a contraction is formed. “You would” or “you had” becomes “you’d.” “You’d love…
Last week we talked about capitalizing words in the business world. Today we’re going to talk about capitalization in general. If you recall, in English, we capitalize proper nouns—words that name a specific thing or person, words such as “Richard” and “Helen”—and we lowercase words that are common nouns that could be used to describe general things—words such as “boy” and “girl.” We also have common adjectives and proper adjectives that follow similar rules. Honorifics Let’s start with what we call honorifics – “doctor,” “professor,” and “dean” are honorifics you might find on an academic campus. Then we have “mister,” “judge,”…