Author: Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty
Mignon Fogarty is the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips and the author of seven books on language, including the New York Times bestseller "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing." She is an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame, and the show is a five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. She has appeared as a guest expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today Show. Her popular LinkedIn Learning courses help people write better to communicate better. Find her on Mastodon.
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…
Since 2006, Mignon Fogarty, also known as Grammar Girl, has delivered trusted tips and fun facts about the English language through her Grammar Girl podcast, newsletter, books, and courses. This is the style guide we have developed internally for our own use, and we thought readers might also find it useful. Many style guides exist, and they serve different purposes for different needs. The Grammar Girl Style Guide below will help you find answers to common grammar and English usage topics that we have needed to decide how to handle. Although these topics are often covered in major style guides,…
Recently, you heard me talk about a “king-size” mattress from Casper, and that reminded me that a listener named Louie had asked me whether he should write about “small and mid-size businesses” or “small and mid-sized businesses.” The short answer is that the better choice is “size,” not “sized”—”king-size” and “mid-size”—although some dictionaries list “king-sized” and “mid-sized” as alternatives. Should you hyphenate ‘king-size’ and ‘mid-size’? As is often the case with hyphens, the answer isn’t as clear—”king-size” usually appears hyphenated, but “mid-size” is routinely seen with and without a hyphen, and some dictionaries show it hyphenated and others don’t. Hyphenate “king-size,”…
The name of the coronavirus disease that emerged in late 2019 is not capitalized because most disease names aren’t unless they are named after a person or a region. For example, influenza, diabetes, and cancer also aren’t capitalized. The other official name for coronavirus disease is COVID-19, which is capitalized because it’s an abbreviation for “COronaVIrus Disease-2019.” Diseases named after regions are capitalized Diseases that are named after regions are capitalized. For example, Ebola is the name of a river in Zaire,* and it was near the Ebola River that the virus first caused disease in humans. Thus, the disease became known…
Lately, it seems as if politicians are constantly calculating whether they should toe the party line, or not. But is that “toe the line” (T-O-E) or “tow the line” (T-O-W)? You can imagine logical reasons for it to be either, but the right choice is “toe the line,” like your toes on your footsies. One of the first examples in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1834 book called “Peter Simple” written by the naval officer and novelist Frederick Marryat. The line reads “He desired us to ‘toe a line’, which means to stand in a row.” “Toe the…
Today Bonnie Mills helps us talk about three punctuation marks: one you undoubtedly know how to use, another you possibly misuse, and yet another you’ve likely never used. If you’ve ever wondered when to favor parentheses over square brackets and when to stick in a pair of curly braces, read on. Parentheses You’re probably well versed in the basics of how to use those sideways eyebrow thingies, better known as parentheses, but the details can get tricky. First, remember that a pair of them is called “parentheses,” but a single one is a “parenthesis.” For now, let’s just say that parentheses mainly…
Should you start a sentence with “there is” or “there are”? Have you ever heard it’s bad to start sentences with “there are,” “there is,” and “it is”? These phrases can be part of what are called expletive sentences. And no! I’m not talking about swearing! Swearing and expletives The word “expletive” comes from Latin that means “to fill,” and in English, it’s come to mean something that takes up space without adding anything. The swear-word meaning goes back to the 1600s and may have been popularized by Sir Walter Scott in the early 1800s. And it was definitely…
Today I’m going to beg the question. When I do radio interviews, callers often ask me about the phrase “begs the question.” They often hear “begs the question” used to mean “raises the question,” and if they took a formal logic class in college or had a particularly diligent English teacher, they think the “raises the question” meaning is wrong. But it’s much more complicated than that. The right way to use ‘begs the question’ “Begs the question” is a term that originally comes from formal logic. It’s a translation of the Latin phrase “petitio principii,” which Merriam-Webster says is…