Desert and Dessert are words that should always trigger mental warnings. Dessert is the sugary treat you eat after dinner. As some say, the extra “s” is for “sweet.” Those with a sweet tooth might also be interested to know that while Merriam-Webster lists a dessert fork and a dessert knife as two words, it […]
“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. […]
Few commas cause as much irritation as the one falling after the state in constructions such as this: Annapolis, MD, is a great place to visit. People are no less happy when it pops up here: Ed Begley, Jr., is a funny actor. And the irritation isn’t just from those who prefer Baltimore or the […]
While reading Mary Roach’s fascinating and surprisingly humorous Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, I came across this sentence: “A series of modern-day Burke-and-Hare–type killings took place barely ten years ago, in Barranquilla, Colombia.” In the 1820s, William Burke and William Hare became notorious for selling corpses to Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox, who eagerly […]
People love to point out other people’s mistakes. Sometimes this is done with an encouraging word and a gentle smile. More often, it’s done less kindly, and is perhaps accompanied by a pointed finger and raucous laughter (try tripping over a rug at a cocktail party sometime). Whatever the case, people generally feel a smug […]
Today I finished a book I had been looking forward to reading, and in fact the book had been a Christmas gift from my daughter, making me savor its reading all the more. I won’t name the book, though, because however much I enjoyed it—and I enjoyed it immensely—there was an incorrect usage throughout. And […]
Damned if sometimes things don’t just look funny. The other day I ran across an “a vs. an” issue that I can’t recall having even thought about before. As we know, when choosing whether to use a or an, we decide based on whether the word the article precedes begins with a vowel or a […]
One guy sits at the bar in his favorite watering hole. Another guy sits down next to him. After a brief exchange, it’s established that the second guy is from out of town. The first guy asks after the football team in the second guy’s home city. The second guy says, “They’re looking really well […]
Quite some time ago, I was critiquing catalog write-ups, some of which I’d written, in a roomful of writers and marketers. A particular piece contained a phrase that read something like this: “A tale where such and such . . .” I made the suggestion that we change “where” to “in which.” One of the […]
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