Pages tagged “grammar”
18 Dec 2015
Bendicks Bittermints
If you have never tried a Bendicks Bittermint, you’re missing out. One of my favourite bits of Christmas. I undertake thorough research before I post anything online (doesn’t everyone?) and was curious about whether there ought to be an apostrophe in the word “Bendicks”. Out of curiosity, I googled a related phrase. By way of explanation, first: I take pride in my spelling and grammar… but when hammering terms into Google, I don’t bother to correct them.23 Sep 2015
Productionizability
I recently had cause to peruse this article and it introduced me to the word “productionizability”. A noun derived from a verb derived from a noun. It made me cringe. Related to this, when I was at school the longest word in English was claimed to be “antidisestablishmentarianism”. It disappointed me, because it’s such a construction. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I always wanted to ask, “why stop there?
01 Mar 2014
A new metaword
My entry for “word of the year 2014” is a metaword, in the sense that it describes itself. I humbly propose “participling”. The word describes the irksome and increasingly common process of taking a well known noun, artificially turning it into a verb, and then going one step further, adding “-ing” to get to a present participle. My friend Jo provided the inspiration for “participling” when she spontaneously and slightly ironically used the word “counterexampling”.22 Mar 2013
The missing article
Grammar can be important in bank statements. Glancing at the statement for the account I share with Sarah, I saw the following withdrawal, to her personal account: EVENING OUT MONEY -300.00 “Rather an expensive night out,” I blustered. Sarah, in the interest of brevity, had omitted the definite article. I was mistakenly led to believe that the first word of her explanation was part of a compound noun, rather than a present participle.
21 Nov 2012
Good dialog, bad dialog
A couple of dialog boxes I’ve encountered recently. One I liked (well done, Marketo), and one I didn’t (Microsoft). I used the spelling “dialog box” deliberately. I would tend to use dialogue, except when talking about dialog boxes in a software context. Here’s an interesting Google n-Gram showing the prevalence of related terms over the past century. ‘dialog’ vs ‘dialogue’ vs ‘dialog box’ vs ‘dialogue box’ Also pleased to see there is a StackExchange for English!
08 Nov 2012