What’s an “Indirect Passive”?
I’ve never heard the term “indirect passive” before. What would you call what he said in the first panel?
I might say that he was hinting…
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Another Example of Linguistic Change
The tendency in English is for words often spoken together to become hyphenated, then become a compound word. For example, “today” used to be “to-day.” And “pick-up” truck has become “a “pickup truck.” Here’s another example, from July of 1941. First and last panel: Do you ever see the word hyphenated any more?
Breaking the Second Rule of Tech Writing
(The first rule is to be clear.) Last speech, on the TV: The second rule is to be concise. That means no more words than necessary. (But all the words that are necessary.) I remember, as a kid, watching a conversation in a movie about Joel Chandler Harris. Joel is told by his mentor that […]
A List of Homophones
Homophones are two (or more) words that have different meanings and different spellings, but the same pronounciation. The cartoonist did a nice job of mentioning several three-way homophones!
False Plurals
Treat false plurals like the singulars they are. These words just happen to end in ‘s.’ Here’s a guy (Mike Peterson) who probably actually knows better getting it wrong. “Economics” is a singular. It gets a singular verb. Unfortunately, we’ve got a significant number of people here who are just as ignorant about how economics […]
