Legal Writing

Say it like a native: place name pronunciation

Posted on June 27, 2009
Staff writer Martha Quillin's story about the pronunciation of Lejeune reminds me of the peculiarities of place name pronunciation. Even if the name of the family was pronounced one way, the name of the Marine base has come to be pronounced another way...

What the Grammar Guide is about

Posted on June 26, 2009
A slogan I've seen from time to time comes to mind today: Christians aren't perfect -- just forgiven. Sometimes I'd like to post this slogan: Grammar advisers aren't perfect -- just trying very hard.  When I decided to write a blog about grammar, usage and style, I was worried about being perceived as an "expert" or, worse, as a pretender -- someone who aspired to be an expert...

Confusing pairs: gel and jell

Posted on June 23, 2009
When we speak of a group or a team coming together to form a cohesive whole or when we write about an idea becoming a concrete plan of action, we usually use the spelling jell for the verb. However, gel can also mean something has taken definite form...

Word watch: reform

Posted on June 21, 2009
Reform has been in the news, both foreign and domestic. In reports about the Iranian election and its violent aftermath, writers have referred to the leading opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi as a reluctant champion of reform. In the debate over health care here at home, advocates and reporters have called the plans for change reform...

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Errors in unexpected places

Posted on June 21, 2009
Sometimes, a error in a public sign surprises me because of the context. I visited Washington late in May and happened to attend an event at the St. Regis, a venerable hotel near the White House. I spotted this sign outside:   I wonder why the sign's writer made the mistake of using 's to make the proper name Astor plural...

You may "Twitter" or "Tweet" now

Posted on June 15, 2009
The Associated Press Stylebook has been updated for 2009. The style guide, used by media organizations throughout the country, has a new entry for Twitter, an online system for distributing messages. The AP says that posting a message on Twitter is to Twitter or to Tweet...

Word choice: Bring and take

Posted on June 09, 2009
A reader objected to this usage in Monday's paper: Stephen Colbert brings his Comedy Central show to Iraq. Indeed, because Colbert was in the United States to start, he must take his show to Iraq. I've run across a couple of other instances of bring where I would use take...

Punctuation particulars: the long dash

Posted on June 08, 2009
Copy editors can be picky. We like accuracy, clarity and consistency. We like to have a good reason for stepping outside the bounds. A recent message from a colleague that referred to the dash as "trite punctuational hyperbole" seemed harsh and rigid to other colleagues...

Phrases you don't hear any more

Posted on May 12, 2009
This morning, the phrase "struck on himself" popped into my head. I realized that I hadn't heard it in ages. It means someone who has an inflated opinion of himself or who is in love with himself. As in, "Earl was the best looking boy in the school, but I thought he was struck on himself...

Dialects: We talk funny everywhere

Posted on May 10, 2009
I love North Carolina dialects. I have one myself -- western Piedmont. I ran across this nifty site today. Take the North Carolina Dialect Quiz and see if you can distinguish among North Carolina regional dialects. One speaker on the quiz sounds just like my mother, born in 1929 in Hickory...

Style guides: 50 years of Strunk and White

Posted on April 16, 2009
Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," one of the most famous books about grammar and usage, was published 50 years ago April 16. The slim book has sold more than 10 million copies, according to this Associated Press report. Its influence is wide...

Word usage: We just want to celebrate

Posted on April 08, 2009
A reader sent this note to our editors today: You make this mistake almost every time a local team wins a title or tournament, so please teach your writers and editors the difference.  A celebrant is someone who performs religious rites.  A celebrator is someone partying and having a good time...

Words that mean something bad has happened

Posted on April 02, 2009
Those who report the news often apply labels to terrible or urgent events: tragedy, disaster, crisis, emergency.  Sometimes, those labels don't quite fit. We risk overstating the trouble. Whenever I read or hear the word tragedy, I remember Theodore M...

Back from hiatus: Triangle Grammar Guide quiz

Posted on March 26, 2009
I've been thinking about how people learn English as a second language and studying inflection, including the way we make plurals and possessives. So here is a short quiz on possessives for native speakers as well as for those who have learned or are learning English as a second language...

Word watch: detainee and combatant

Posted on March 14, 2009
A headline from today's newspaper, "U.S. drops 'enemy combatant' label; detainees remain," made me curious about the suffixes in "combatant" and "detainee." The meanings of the suffixes play  essential roles in the meanings of the words created...

Pronouns without gender

Posted on March 07, 2009
Some have long lamented that English has no gender-neutral pronoun to use in a construction such as this: Everyone needs his or her breakfast. In regular, everyday speech, we might say "their" instead of "his or her." But "everyone" is singular, so the pronoun following it should be singular...

Happy National Grammar Day

Posted on March 04, 2009

Get ready for National Grammar Day

Posted on March 01, 2009

Does this make me a grammarista?

Posted on February 28, 2009

The language of letting go

Posted on February 15, 2009
The words and phrases of an economic downturn fill our newspaper and Web site these days. One such phrase prompted a reader to write that we were "butchering" the language. The offending sentence was in a report of possible job losses in state government...

Word watch: stimulus

Posted on February 07, 2009
The economic stimulus bill that Congress and President Obama have been discussing this week led me to the dictionary today. I figured that the word had Latin roots, and indeed, it does. Stimulus means "something that rouses or excites to action," according to Webster's New World College Dictionary...

Word advice: Differ from vs. differ with

Posted on February 01, 2009
A colleague asked about the distinction between "differ from" and "differ with."  In R.W. Burchfield's update of Fowler's usage guide, he writes that "in the sense to be unlike, distinguishable," differ is followed by from...

Word advice: Prepositions

Posted on January 30, 2009
A colleague asked about a preposition the other day. (Copy editors are funny that way.) He was puzzling over this set of sentences: Hornsby?s boss called the search unlawful and forbade Hornsby to conduct searches without first getting permission from his supervisor...

In defense of editing

Posted on January 30, 2009
John McIntyre, director of the Baltimore Sun's copy desk, has a few things to say about Wikipedia in a recent blog post. But he also has something to say about editing: "My whole professional effort for nearly three decades has been to make sure that the published texts at the newspapers for which I have worked are, as far as human fallibility and the pressures of time will allow, factually accurate, grammatical and clear...

We learned it in third grade

Posted on January 29, 2009
Sometimes, when I see apostrophes used to make plurals, I wonder where those writers were in third grade when most of us were learning to add -s or -es to make plurals. Most of what we need to know to punctuate correctly was taught in the early grades...

The word of the year?

Posted on January 11, 2009
The American Dialect Society chose bailout as the word of the year for 2008. Here is the news release from the society. Among the other nominees: shovel-ready and game-changer. The trend started by references to "Joe the plumber" caught on like wildfire...

Whose pronoun is it anyway?

Posted on January 10, 2009
Even the notoriously smarty pants "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" (and I say that with affection and admiration) makes a mistake that bedevils many of us. In a caption promoting Friday night's story about Sarah Palin's interview, the "Countdown" crew on MSNBC mixed up whose (possessive) and who's (contraction for "who is")...

Bushisms: Presidential language

Posted on January 04, 2009
The Associated Press has a piece analyzing how President George W. Bush's personality affected his legacy and a companion piece on the 43rd president's verbal gaffes. My favorite has always been: "They misunderestimated the compassion of our country...

Top words and new words: It's exhaustipating

Posted on January 01, 2009
I know that some readers of this blog are perturbed by new words and changing usage. Sometimes I am too. But the dynamic nature of English is exciting. We don't have to embrace every new word that comes along and we can keep slang in its place, but sometimes we just have to recognize a good word when we read it or hear it...

Grammar complaint goes nowhere

Posted on December 29, 2008
Professor Stanley Fish has an amusing tale of a grammar complaint on his New York Times blog. Fish is a former chairman of the English Department at Duke University.

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