Trudy Ripka writes I have come across recipes which are made into healthier versions of the original. My problem is accepting the word “HEALTHIFIED”. There is a particular site which uses this and a lot of the readers dislike the term; I am included. This could be a case of “verbing adjectives”. Whatever we call … Read more
Vex means to annoy, disturb or torment. Usually the distress is a mental one, but vex can also mean to cause physical pain. What appeared to vex Mr. Cheney the most were Mr. Emanuel’s remarks, which the former vice president cast as an attempt to shift the blame for inaction onto the Bush administration. (NY … Read more
Submitting stories to writing contests (Reedsy has an updated list with over 300 contests) can be quite lucrative if you know the tricks of the trade. At the same time it is easy to make an avoidable mistake and miss out. Many books published now use single quotation marks for speech. I followed this format … Read more
Graham Broadley asks: Should it be: where is my fifty dollars or where are my fifty dollars. Most people would say is, would they be correct? Surely are would be more correct, being plural, right? Wrong. When the subject stands for a definable unit, such as money, measurement, time, organization and food combinations, the verb is … Read more
We discovered that some examples below might be an incorrect use of the trademark. Please check the update below with explanations from the trademark owner itself. It wasn’t until I wanted to write about an incident in which a policeman applied a Taser to a ten-year-old girl that I needed to know if I should … Read more