A Good Technique

Okay, they should make her look more glamorous, because she’s got good grammar technique! (Am I biased???) She’s suggesting they take out the plural to see how their sentence sounds.

The grammar rule is to use the objective case (me) after a preposition. We get this correct when the object is alone, but for some reason, people often don’t do this when they have a compound object.

Make her look more like my wife.

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I mentioned this last December (2019) and also back in 2016, but it bears repeating, I suppose. The “correct” plural of “medium” is “media.”

But I’m seeing “mediums” more and more; at least when referring to something besides radio and television broadcasting. To wit:

As well as testing how long the virus is stable in aerosol form, the researchers studied the virus’s surface stability on four different mediums: plastic, stainless steel, copper, and cardboard.

The general conclusions from the study, distributed in press releases and widely reported in the media, suggest the virus survives for days on different surfaces, and several hours in aerosol form.

The New England Journal of Medicine, late March 2020

I think the broadcasting industry has taken over the old plural, and we feel the need to create something new to avoid misunderstanding. I don’t think the transition is complete; I occasionally see “media” in other fields, particularly art, but I think a new plural is where the language is headed.

Maybe you can find some examples to put in the comments.

We usually leave out periods in abbreviations, especially the common abbreviations, and ones we pronounce as words (NASA, for example) but the rule is:

Use periods in an abbreviation to remove ambiguity.

Here’s a good example of a cartoonist using that rule to make his point.

Remember, I use comics to illustrate grammar. As always, ignore the politics.

English is mostly uninflected (it doesn’t have many word endings) so word order makes a difference. Here’s a good example; first two panels:

Greek, for example, is heavily inflected, so word order doesn’t matter so much. The endings tell what words connect to each other. In fact they have a literary technique called chiasmus where the first half of a sentence has the parts of speech in the exact opposite order as the second half. You can’t do that in English. I don’t think. Try to do it and submit your suggestion in the comments.

I see these so seldom, I feel a need to give them a plug.

The rule is that “only” goes directly before the word it modifies, not at the beginning of the whole clause. Look in the lower left corner.

Now that’s not so hard, is it?