Blog

On September 19, 2010, Gene Weingarten published an article in The Washington Post titled “Goodbye Cruel Word: English, It’s Dead to Me.” Here are some excerpts. The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the “youngest” […]

I am distressed when I see otherwise educated people making silly mistakes. People judge your professionalism and intelligence by the way you use words, so please, use language correctly. For example, take the word drown. The past tense of drown is drowned. The process of becoming drowned is drowning. Ladies and gentlemen, I do not

Last week’s post highlighted a few qualified absolutes such as “most unique” and some silly redundancies like “delete out”. Here are a few more for the record book: ATM Machine Trick question, folks. What does the “M” in ATM stand for? Whether or not vs. whether The word “whether” implies the “or not”; it’s unnecessary

Some phrases exude redundancy and illogic. I sometimes wonder if people think, “If one word is good, two is better – if I say it twice, people will be sure to understand me.” In refuting this view, I quote Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Never use two words when one will do.” Here is a partial

In a recent blog post, Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate.com, derided the use of two spaces after periods. He maintains that contemporary typographers require only one space after a period. He attributes the two-space rule to the vagaries of old-fashioned typewriters, which did not use proportional spacing for different-sized letters. The two spaces were