A site to help make English grammar more understandable without dumbing down either its significance or its usage.
I grew up believing (maybe I was even taught this) that fun, funner and funnest were the proper positive, comparative and superlative forms of fun. But then I did some research and found some interesting debates going on:
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m adamantly against any English slang, vernacular or witticisms. I’m mostly against the abuse of colloquialisms such as awesome, which is now so hackneyed as to be pukifying (causing one to puke, a word I just made up). Sports jock radio host [tag]Colin Cowherd[/tag] actually had a couple [...]
I’ve brought this up before, but does using the word awesome really have any meaning? In the beginning, God saw that it was great and enjoyable and called it bitchin‘. Later, this was morphed into groovy, phat, sick, bad, etc. Do we know how to communicate anymore without being groovy and, sad to say, silly [...]
Indian-born author [tag]Salman Rushdie[/tag] was recently knighted by the Queen of England, where he long lived and worked. It was there almost 20 years ago that he published The Satanic Verses, which was immediately castigated as blasphemy by many in the Muslim world. The Ayatollah Khomeini even issued a fatwa of death against him that still [...]
I spend a lot of my time dealing with Internet issues. For the past few years, all the buzz has been about the social networking sites like My Space and the social bookmarking sites like Digg, which are part of what’s called [tag]Web 2.0[/tag]. But have you ever read the stuff that’s being posted on [...]
On certain computer monitors my previous theme, named Magellan, looked fine, but on others it was just too hard to read. So, after considerable research, I’ve switched over to this new, more open and "whiter" theme named Rockin’ Big Idea. I hope you enjoy it. Now if I can just figure out how to get [...]
I’m not sure if this word usage qualifies as a NotWord, but it certainly qualifies as incorrect. As a university instructor, both on-ground and online, I read a lot of papers. One great mistake I see a lot and which surprises me is the use of since when the author means sense. Someone will write, for instance, that "his [...]
I’m no longer surprised when native English speakers (Americans) cannot define or locate in a sentence any of the eight parts of speech used in English. It just reflects the sorry state of education in the U.S. The educational establishment starting in the 1960s or so developed this "drill and kill" mentality that rejected the [...]
Now, you hear this all the time: "I graduated high school in 1982." No matter what year you use in there, the construction is still incorrect. The active verb form of graduate refers to what the school or institution does: It graduates students. Thus you are graduated or were graduated from high school, college, prison [...]
This may be a bit off track for my audience, especially for those outside the United States, but I have simple advice for Yankees baseballer [tag]Jason Giambi[/tag]: "Shut up!" I appreciate what Giambi has said publicly so far–especially the part that everyone in baseball should apologize for the sham of the steroid era when unbreakable [...]