loans and lending
Lend—a verb. Something you do, possibly to regret later.
Loan—a noun. The loan is what you might or might not be repaid after you lend it to someone.
Do your lending carefully, and try to keep your loans affordable, in case they don’t pay back what you loaned them.
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Those little horizontal lines matter
We commonly use three little horizontal lines in English: the hyphen, the N-dash, and the M-dash. Some people say we use hyphens and dashes, but I prefer the increased precision of saying two dashes. They’re named for how wide they are, by the way; the width of a capital N or a capital M.
Everybody knows [...]
In which I rant on about hyphens
Harrumpf! I’d expect a notable scientific journal like the Daily Galaxy to get these things right. Especially after I so recently described how to do it. (I’m sure they read my missives regularly…)
When you have a phrase that’s used as an adjective, you hyphenate it. That way you know the first word in the phrase [...]
Hyphen or not?
Our lesson today, class, is about when and when not to hyphenate phrases.
Hyphenate adjective phrases. You can have set-up instructions, a step-by-step plan, a last-minute trip, living-room furniture, and out-of-the-box thinking. All these phrases are adjectives. They describe nouns (technically the word should be the more generic term “substantives,” not “nouns.” “Thinking” isn’t a noun, [...]
I’m back!
Whew! Oof! Wow. Hmpf. Sorry to have been down so long. I never thought a change of registrar would take so long.
I own a couple domains, registered in several places, and moved them all to 1and1.com so I’d have the same registrar for them all, and need to go to only one place. I think [...]
