Do This to Improve Your Texting

I don’t recommend doing this live person-to-person, though.

But it’s funny.

I wonder how he got that ball to perch on that sloping skateboard, though.

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It’s called A Word A Day. Here’s a recent first line:

The word pentasyllabic actually has five syllables. The term seventeen-lettered actually has 17 letters. TLA (Three-Letter Abbreviation) has three letters.

https://wordsmith.org/words/today.html (today = June 20, 2022)

Click the link and go look around: https://wordsmith.org/

I’m not sure about the grammar in that last panel, what the boss says:

I can think of three ways to say the verbs in his comment.

• I would have liked to see that a year ago.
• I would have liked to have seen that a year ago.
• I would like to have seen that a year ago.

Which one is best? Are the others incorrect? What are the differences in meaning?

On occasion we say (write) something like “go part way up the street” and it feels perfectly natural. We might also say something like “that’s only a part-way solution,” and that’s still okay. Now look at this sentence:

“There” in this case is Mars, specifically partway up the flank of Aeolis Mons, aka Mt. Sharp, the massive central peak in Gale Crater, where NASA’s Curiosity rover is still poking around.

https://badastronomy.substack.com/p/ban-378-giving-thanks-a-most-curious

This is a rather common change in English. We go from separate words, to hyphenated, to one word. (One of my favorite examples of this is the change from to-day to today.)

Anyway, this tendency to move toward single words is fairly common.

Here’s the picture that the sentence is about:

PS—Here’s a word that has finished the transition to one word, and the writer gets it wrong.

Maybe he split “shortcoming” to make a nicer line break; but then, he should have hyphenated it.

Panel 1, not panel 3

Please. Don’t say “on accident.”