Talk About Redundancy!

He calls it “fat,” I call it “fluff.”

Please don’t do this!

BTW, if you’re a teacher, I recommend this comic. The cartoonist is a teacher, and he’s pretty good.

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The young lady is not usually an example of good things in the Luann comic, but she illustrates a good point here.

You have permission to end a sentence with a “preposition”!

Actually it’s an adverb, or part of a separable verb, if you prefer. Use the search box on the upper right corner to see more posts on this subject.

Okay, so here’s the comic.

Maybe that last panel is a good illustration of why you can do this.

First the comic, then the comments.

A neologism is a word you make up. Literally, the term means “new word.”

Here’s the rule about neologisms: If you’re a native speaker, you can make up words all you want. The presumption is that you did it on purpose. But if you’re not a native speaker and you say a word that doesn’t exist, people will snicker at you because you made a mistake!

This comic illustrates the principle that defines sarcasm: a sarcastic statement means the opposite of what it says.

Reminds me of the famous joke where “yeah right” means “no.”

No doubt you know that words can have more than one meaning. You might not have considered that context is the key for deciding which meaning is appropriate.

Here we have five meanings of “two” in an ambiguous context. Try not to do this in your writing.

So: Consider your context!