Daniel Scocco Latin Words and Expressions: All You Need to Know: Even though Latin is considered a dead language (no country officially speaks it), its influence upon other languages makes it still important. Latin words and expressions are present in virtually all the languages around the world, as well as on different scientific and academic fields. The … Read more
Another day I was browsing around the Internet and I came across this sentence: You might want to check out this great article that I found; it is entitled “bla bla bla.” But was the article really entitled? There is a common confusion between the words titled and entitled. Titled would have been the correct … Read more
Even though Latin is considered a dead language (no country officially speaks it), its influence upon other languages makes it still important. Latin words and expressions are present in virtually all the languages around the world, as well as on different scientific and academic fields. Below you will find a list with the most used … Read more
Sometime ago Maeve wrote a brilliant post titled “Let the Word do the Work.” On the article she was manifesting hes despair towards the common use of redundancies like “return back” or “speeding too fast.” The conclusion is straight forward: it’s as if people don’t trust a word to mean what it means. The same … Read more
Turmoil (tûr’moil’), the verb, means to harass or to disturb. It is more widely used as a noun, however, where it means a state of confusion, agitation or tumult. A labor strike, for instance, can create turmoil inside a country. Even the people most at fault for the recent turmoil—the creators of the collateralised-debt obligations … Read more
An algorithm (ăl’gə-rĭTH’əm) is a procedure defined to solve a problem, usually structured in steps. The algorithm takes an input, carries the steps and then produces an output. Google, for instance, uses an algorithm to find the most relevant web pages on the Internet whenever your perform a search query. Algorithms sound scary, of interest … Read more
The apostrophe has a wide range of uses within the English language. Forming plurals, however, is not one of them. Many people, especially those that speak English as a foreign language, tend to make this blatant mistake. Here are some examples illustrating this punctuation error: According to the rule’s we should follow him. The waiter … Read more
Meritocracy (mĕr’ĭ-tŏk’rə-sē) is a system where the advancement of individuals is based on their performance and ability. American companies, for instance, are said to be more meritocratic than Italian ones, where nepotism (family connections) prevail. Yet if you look beyond party politics at some of the things that have distinguished America—mobility, immigration, meritocracy, volunteerism—a more … Read more
Ambivalent (ăm-bĭv’ə-lənt) is an adjective used to characterize things that have conflicting feelings or attitudes. If you are ambivalent about politics, for example, you have opposite feelings about it. Google evokes ambivalent feelings. Some users now keep their photos, blogs, videos, calendars, e-mail, news feeds, maps, contacts, social networks, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and credit-card information—in … Read more
Conundrum (kə-nŭn’drəm) is a very difficult or insoluble problem. It can also refer to a riddle whose answer is a pun, a paradox or an enigma. But we have heard a lot less about these debt-market disciplinarians in recent years. Instead, bond yields have been puzzlingly low, a conundrum that taxed even Alan Greenspan, the … Read more
We have already covered the basics of this punctuation mark on the article Introducing the Comma. Basically, commas are used after introductory elements on sentences (e.g., introductory words, phrases,clauses). Commas are also used to separate dependent clauses, like this: As it was raining, we decided to stay home. The comma can also be used to … Read more
Tacit refers to something that is implied by actions or statements. A tacit agreement, for instance, is one where either the offer or the acceptance are to be inferred from a particular conduct. It comes from the Latin tacitus, which means silent. This was a tacit acknowledgement that recent money-market interventions had failed to cap … Read more