A reader has a question about the old-fashioned nouns woof and weft: It doesn’t come up often, but it bothers me when it does: a reference to the “warp and woof” of fabric (either physical or metaphorical) instead of “warp and weft.” I recently saw “warp and woof” in The New York Times. One dictionary … Read more
A freelancer who writes about film wants to know how to deal with two French terms used by filmmakers: If I’m dealing with more than one film, is it “femmes fatale” or “femme fatales?” And when it comes to multiple films of film noir, is it “films noir” or “film noirs?” Plus, given that the terms … Read more
A reader wonders about prepositions used with the verb to die: Just recently when a prominent politician passed away I saw and heard various reports that he had died – FROM cancer, WITH cancer, and OF cancer. Do you have a view on which may be better? Preposition use is one of the most rapidly … Read more
The words flout and flaunt convey very different meanings, but they are often used as if they were interchangeable. flout (verb): to mock, jeer, insult; to express contempt for, either in word or action. For example, a person flouts the law by refusing to obey it. flaunt (verb): to display ostentatiously or obtrusively; to flourish, … Read more
I’ve just learned five new business verbs: onboard, level-set, operationalize, descope, and action-plan. One meaning of to onboard is “to train new employees.” The expression is so common that many professional sites actually use the labels Onboard and Onboarding in their menus to direct new employees to relevant information. Most of the time, the expression … Read more
The way some writing coaches slam Passive Voice, one might imagine that its use constitutes a grammatical error. It doesn’t. In the context of grammar, Voice refers to the relation of the subject of a verb to the action of the verb. In English, there are two possibilities: 1. The subject performs the action. 2. … Read more
Researching another topic altogether, I came across this startling use of the word posthumously: Nicholas Schmidle, whose narrative account of the death of Osama bin was completed without ever interviewing any members of SEAL Team 6, posthumously wrote an article entitled “In the Crosshairs’’ in The New Yorker. Posthumously means “after death.” An article may … Read more
Reading an advice article about the writing of historical fiction, I came across what I assume is an eggcorn for the idiom “to shore up.” eggcorn: the reshaping of a common word or expression in a way that makes sense to the speaker. The person writing the article drew an analogy between the construction of … Read more
Reading A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton, (St. Martin’s Minotaur, New York, 2003), I was distracted by the author’s frequent references to the necessity of a pilot’s having to “bale out” of his aircraft. How odd, I thought, that such a spelling error would slip by in a book of this quality. Surely the … Read more
A reader questions the standard advice that the adverb more should not be linked to an adjective by a hyphen: I find that most style guides do not favor hyphenating phrases starting with “more” (e.g., more honest). I find the following phrase in the manuscript that I am currently editing: “more explicit predictions.” This could … Read more
A reader asks: How does one pronounce properly the word “dour”? Should it rhyme with “sour” or “door” or be pronounced something like the whiskey “Dewar’s” or perhaps “doer”? Dour is an adjective that came into English from a Scottish word that in turn probably came from the word that gives us durable: durus: “hard.” … Read more
Reading that a child in Texas was suspended for bringing “an imaginary ring” to school, I marveled that the school officials were able to detect the ring’s presence. Here’s the headline: Texas School Suspends 9-Year-Old for Terrorism Because He Brought Imaginary Hobbit Ring To School In fact, the child brought a real ring to school, … Read more