Not Me!

I just had to comment on this:

I can think lying down, but I have to be at least sitting to write!

At least he said “lying down” instead of “laying down.” I gotta give him that.

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Antonym is the word for “opposite” as applied to words. You probably already know that, but this version of the lesson is too good to pass up.

And in case you didn’t know (ha) synonym is the antonym of “antonym.”

A synonym is a word that has the same or a similar meaning as another word. this comic is basically a list of synonyms, except maybe the last one. What would you call that? An opinion? An adjective?

I’d have suggested “unwise” or “foolish” myself.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know I preach against redundancy, aka unnecessary repetition. Such as “do it over again.” (Either “over” or “again,” but not both.) We call this being concise.

Well, maybe I just ran into a case where the redundancy is necessary!

After all, just “drink” all by itself implies drinking booze, right?

You see compound adjectives done correctly a lot, so you probably get them correct yourself. You could say it’s a deep-seated habit. Here’s a guy who got it wrong:

Well, his mistake is justified. The rule is that two adjectives (or nouns used attributively) that modify a word together should be hyphenated. So we have the five-second rule about dropped food.

An adverb-adjective pair, though, usually isn’t hyphenated because the adverb modifies just the adjective. For example, we can have a very dark night, or a thoroughly spoiled custard. And “after holiday” is an adverb-adjective pair.

But sometimes that adverb-adjective pair just makes more sense as a compound adjective. “After” is an adverb, but he’s not saying that he’s doing something after the holiday; he’s saying that the bills are the after-holiday type. So here we have the uncommon case of an adverb-adjective compound.

It’s a judgement call, so think when you write.