Month: February 2014

Hie Ye to Riverside for the Dickens Festival

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Dickens-Festival-Riverside
‘Trial of Jack the Ripper’ held on the steps of the Riverside County Courthouse as part of Dickens Festival.

I literally stumbled upon Riverside’s 21st annual Dickens Festival while I was downtown for a BLT and IPA (both yummy).

The festival is replete with costumed Dickensian characters and stagings of scenes from Dickens’ many works.

The festival covers about three blocks of booths, food, fun and camaraderie. If you’re anywhere near Riverside, I highly recommend that you “hie” yourself to the city before 5 p.m. Sunday (Feb. 23).

I’m right now attempting to buy tickets to the event’s Tea Time Tasties and Show with Mr. Treacle.

Categories: News

Lost in Transition

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I’ve changed hosting companies and WordPress themes so many times that I’ve lost track, but in the process, I never thought that transitioning my site would result in textual errors.

While going through my articles section, I saw that a weird typographical symbol had inserted itself wherever there was more than one space between sentences or words.

Lesson number one: In the electronic media era, using two spaces between sentences is out because of font issues. It still works on typewriters, but who besides morticians use typewriters these days?

Anyway, I’ve cleaned up the articles (let me know if I missed anything), and soon I hope to get back to creating some new — and perhaps more useful — articles on English writing, grammar and usage.

If you have topics, just use Contact Me and share them with me.

Categories: Grammar Notes

Does One ‘Debut’ or ‘Make a Debut’?

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I found a headline today on AOL a bit wordy and awkward. It said, “NYC Mayor Makes Debut on ‘The Daily Show’.”

So that had me scrambling to the dictionary to see if I have been erroneously using debut as a verb all these years.

Turns out, debut is both noun and verb, but I still prefer the verb version over “makes debut,” even though there’s nothing wrong with that usage.

As Kornheiser and Wilbon would say, “Big deal, small deal or no deal?”

Categories: Grammar Notes