Author: Mignon Fogarty

A few weeks ago we talked about words that have changed meaning over time, like “nice” and “silly.” Another one of those words was “bully,” which in its early days, was a friendly way of addressing someone. For example, here’s a line from the “Century Dictionary,” published in the 1800s, which says it’s a way of referring to a high-spirited, dashing fellow: “I love the lovely bully.”  In that episode about changing meanings, we didn’t talk about the phrase “bully pulpit,” and a few of you asked about it, so here’s a quick follow-up: You might think the phrase refers…

If you’re into sports, entertainment, politics, the news — you encounter commentators all the time. Heck, even the spelling bee has commentators. And that word, “commentator,” has been around since the 1400s without much fuss. The verb “commentate,” though — it gets people positively riled up. Despite the uproar, “commentate” isn’t as new as you’d think. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage traces it back to the late 18th century although it really took off around 1990, if you look at a Google Ngram search.  Merriam-Webster also says that although “commentate” is widely disparaged in the United States, they “know…

A listener named Andrea once had the job title of “scriptwriter,” which spellcheck didn’t like. She said in her annual appraisal one year, her boss’s assistant accidentally selected the first option that the spellchecker suggested. Apparently, Andrea was a fabulous streetwalker. Typos, my friends, are not errors of judgment. When they’re not the result of autocorrect, they’re often the result of our fingers taking off on their own little adventures across the keyboard.  But before we figure out how to catch them, let’s laugh at them — because they can definitely be funny when you aren’t the one being embarrassed.…

My tip-a-day-book, “The Grammar Daily,” is coming out November 24, and I’m currently encouraging people to preorder it —  and I know I’ll get the same comments I get when I encourage you to preorder other people’s books: that the word “preorder” is redundant because you can really only order something. People logically argue that when they click the buy button, they’re ordering, not doing some kind of action that comes before ordering. How Preordering Helps Authors I completely understand what people mean. I do. But “preorder” has a different meaning in the publishing world. It specifically means to order…

How old is the @ symbol? Every source I found seemed to have a different date for the origin of the at symbol, so I’m not going to commit to a certain date. Let’s just say it was a long time ago — at least in the Middle Ages. Many sources, including the Ask Oxford website and a book called “Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany,” report that the “at” symbol comes from shorthand for the Latin word “ad” — A.D. — which means “to, toward, or at.” Scribes used to use it to list prices on invoices and accounting…

Anxious “Anxious” means “worried or uneasy,” but it has often been used somewhat interchangeably with the word “eager,” to mean “full of keen desire” — but that flexibility seems to be changing. We got the word “anxious” directly from Latin where it meant essentially the same thing: worried, disturbed, uneasy, and so on. Eager “Eager,” on the other hand, comes directly from French, and an interesting usage quirk is that although French did have the “full of keen desire” meaning, it had many more negative meanings for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions “severe,” “fierce,” “savage,” “pungent,” “strenuous,”…

Trent Armstrong (our former Modern Manners Guy) sent me a picture of a sign that mixed up the words “personal” and “personnel.” That’s one I hadn’t seen before. It read, “Keep Out. Thunderbird Personal Only.” ‘Personal’ versus ‘personnel’: the root “Personal” and “personnel” have the same Latin root — “personalis” 1,2  — which means that knowing the root is no help if you’re trying to remember the different spellings. ‘Personal’ versus ‘personnel’: the definitions “Personal” relates to your person or your body, or implies a sense of closeness. For example, if you are someone’s personal friend, you’re suggesting that the…

When you walk, do you amble? Meander? Shuffle? Trundle? I definitely trundle. I walk almost every day, and when it’s time, my husband always asks, “Are you ready to trundle?” And if he’s being really funny, he’ll say “Get ready to trundle!” in an announcer voice, as if we’re heading out to something as exciting as a wrestling match. 1. Trundle “Trundle” the verb comes from “trundle” the noun, which first appeared in the year 1564 to describe a trundle bed because it referred to small wheels or rollers, and a trundle bed is a bed on rollers that you…

If you want a simple rule, the difference between “less” and “fewer” is straightforward: The traditional advice is that “fewer” is for things you count, and “less” is for things you don’t count. You can count M&Ms, glasses of water, and potatoes — so you eat fewer M&Ms, serve fewer glasses of water, and buy fewer potatoes for the salad. You can’t count candy, water, or potato salad — so you eat less candy, observe that the lake has less water, and make less potato salad for the next potluck. The ‘singular versus plural’ rule As I said, that’s the…

Some of the most difficult questions I get are from non-native English speakers who want to know why we use a particular preposition in a specific phrase. Why do we say, “I’m in bed,” instead of “I’m on bed”? Do people “suffer from” a disease or “suffer with” a disease? Are we “in a restaurant” or “at a restaurant”? I’m a native English speaker, so my first thought is usually something like, “I don’t know why; ‘in bed’ just sounds right,” and sometimes both options are correct. Here’s a question I hear regularly: Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Tom Kennedy…