For some reason, people love to create plurals by adding an apostrophe. Or should I say, “to create plural’s.” (The answer is no. No I should not. And neither should you.) This is especially evident during the festive season, when most of us have some sort of holiday or other to celebrate, and we attempt …
Tag Archive: tips
Feb 20
The best day of my life! I could be happier!
“I could care less,” when you mean that you care not at all and, thus, couldn’t actually care less, has been a wrinkle in my sock since I was a child. Here’s one of the best tutorials on how to stop saying this wrong, by a wonderful English comedian, Dave Mitchell. And as a bonus, …
Jan 29
Not the greatest of e’s
It puzzles me to hear the odd way people sometimes pronounce the word “processes.” They say “processees,” as if it were the name of a Greek hero, mighty Processes, friend of Hercules and Achilles, slayer of Parentheses and Apostrophes. There are, of course, words that come from Greek and do make their plurals with “ees” sounds, …
Jan 15
To learn how something works, take it apart
As an adolescent, I learned to diagram sentences. People that age rarely know what that means anymore. When you diagram a sentence, you create a kind of map of it, like a wiring diagram or a flow chart, that illustrates exactly how all the words in that sentence relate to each other and what roles …
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