Okay, a Didactic Post Today

A lesson about compound adjectives. Last speech in the last two panels:

When two words together refer to a third word, alwayse hyphenate the two words! So it should be “follow-up question.” Unless one of the two words is an adverb, such as “very.” Adverbs can directly modify adjectives, so they don’t need the hyphen. This can be a very tricky rule to get right.

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Using an adjective for an adverb is a fairly common error. Last word:

You know the word should be “easily,” right?

First panel. People who do this are sometimes called “grammar nazis.”

(I’m sorry, but Comics Kingdom links are bad) The comic is down a ways in this Comic Strip of the Day post: https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2024/07/06/csotd-the-lion-always-gets-his-share/

And actually, in this case he’s defending a spurious rule. That “to” is an adverb at the end of the sentence, part of a separable verb. It’s not a preposition, even though it looks like one.

I’ll save the lesson in the next-to-last panel for another day.

Maybe I’m just complaining, but here’s the message:

I’ve had pretty good luck with Ikea’s pictorial instructions, but I hear a lot of folks complain about the lack of text. I even heard an in-house Ikea joke about how hard it was to bury the president of the company after he died because they had difficulty figuring out how to assemble the coffin.

First the comic. The last two panels:

Yes, you should modify a verb with an adverb, so “played badly” is right. But she doesn’t get his rule: Don’t correct someone’s English unless they ask you to. This is one of my life rules, and I confess sometimes it’s hard to obey. The only people who like being corrected are professionals in the field.

So correct me all you want!