We all know that spell checkers aren’t much help in catching homonyms. English speakers are still expected to discern the difference between pear, pare, and pair by drawing on what they should have learned in school. Some words, however, have no sound-alikes. Spell checkers do a great job of flagging one-of-a-kind words like tragedy, definitely, … Read more
Posts on the topic of pronunciation usually provoke a lot of attention, often drawing heated defenses of one pronunciation over another and suggesting that only one can ever be “correct.” In fact, “correct” pronunciation differs from century to century and from region to region. Words are affected by pronunciation changes of two kinds: 1. Changes … Read more
A reader wonders about the American pronunciation of the word mobile: When Americans refer to the thing that all of us carry around as our personal digital appendage, they rhyme it with “bill.” The rest of the world (i.e., where I live) pronounce it to rhyme it with “bile.” I’m not talking about the adjective … 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
This sentence on a grammar site is intended to illustrate the use of the colon: It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmellow ice cream, and a bottle of champagne saved from another party. (Joan Didion) The use of the colon is fine, but a word is misspelled. I wouldn’t swear … Read more
A reader wonders about the plural for a marketing term: Recently the CEO of a company wrote an email to me saying that his software would automatically generate “call-to-actions.” I am pretty sure he should have written “calls-to-action.” Am I right? The reader is correct. When pluralizing a compound word that contains more than one … Read more
Every so often I receive a comment like this one: Why do you and your countrymen insist on changing the English language? The plural of aquarium is aquaria, stadium is stadia, etc. etc. I like to believe that such comments are meant playfully, to get a rise out of the American. For one thing, the … Read more
A Facebook comment alerted me to a misspelling of the word pendulum that I’d never seen before. Once I began looking, I found thousands of examples. I wasn’t too surprised to find the word misspelled in social media, but it did seem strange to see pendulum spelled “pentulum” on sites selling clocks. Here are a … Read more
A reader wonders how knowing a word’s origin helps spelling bee contestants arrive at the correct spelling: Recently, I was watching [a spelling bee] competition and students were asking about the origin of a spelling like Latin, French, Greek, Dutch, Italian etc. and were guessing correct spellings. How is it possible to get correct spelling … Read more
The third time I let the erroneous “principle parts” slip into a published post instead of the correct “principal parts,” I began to worry. Why would I continue to make this mistake even though I know perfectly well that the word spelled principle is used only as a noun and never as an adjective? Principal, … Read more
If you are an American speaker, you probably pronounce the word err to rhyme with air. Although American, I went to school to nuns from Newfoundland; I learned to pronounce err to rhyme with fur, as in Pope’s verse, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” Literally, “to err” means “to wander or go astray … Read more
My post A Useful Reminder About ‘An’ prompted an outpouring of emails asking, “How about an history or an historic?” Some points of English usage stir strong feelings. Placing the indefinite article “an” in front of the words historical or historic is one of these. Here are some comments prompted by a post I wrote … Read more