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.
Today we’re going to talk about regionalisms. Mostly about the “needs washed” quirk of Pittsburghese, but I may throw in some other fun ones at the end. Whenever I give radio interviews, especially when the station is in the Midwest, callers almost always ask questions like this one from Douglas: The other day I heard a co-worker say, “My car needs washed.” I THINK she should have said, “My car needs to be washed” or “I need to get my car washed” or perhaps even “My car needs washing.” What do you think? I think Douglas’ co-worker almost certainly grew…
“Backward” and “backwards” can both be adjectives and adverbs, so you can say, “Squiggly jumped backward when Aardvark shouted, ‘Boo!’”—that’s using “backward” as an adverb. It’s describing the way Squiggly is moving, the same way you might say he jumped frantically or jumped high. And you can say, “Grammar Girl wishes her Xbox had backward compatibility,”—that’s using “backward” as an adjective. It’s describing the type of compatibility I wish I had, the same way you might say a fabulous couple has perfect compatibility. Adjectives: ‘Backward’ and ‘backwards’ As an adjective — in that “backward compatibility” way — Garner’s Modern English Usage says…
When you’re writing a title, you’re confronted with a shocking number of formatting options. How you decide to handle capitalization is up to you; it’s a style choice. But all the major style guides make recommendations. Here are some of the major styles I’ve seen: 1. Capitalize every word of the headline. Maybe the simplest possible style is to just capitalize every single word, and that’s what Buzzfeed does. 2. Capitalize the headline like a sentence. Another really simple style is often called “sentence style” because it’s how you write sentences. Only capitalize the first letter of the first word…
Researching the word “funnest” and its close relation “funner” turned out to be a lot less fun than I had hoped. The opinions are so varied that I became completely engrossed and frustrated and forgot to call my mother on her birthday. Sorry, Mom. ‘Fun,’ the noun First, the easy part. Everyone agrees that “fun” was originally just a noun. For example, you could say, “We had fun,” which is the grammatical equivalent of “We had cake.” Fun is more of an abstract thing than cake, but they’re both nouns. People at the same party may disagree about whether they…
Today’s topic is the difference between abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms. Abbreviations and acronyms Any shortened form of a word is an abbreviation, for example, “etc.” for “etcetera” and “Oct.” for “October”; but acronyms are a special kind of abbreviation, such as “ROFL” (rolling on the floor laughing) and “OPEC” (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), that can be pronounced as words. This makes them a subset of abbreviations. All acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms. Initialisms Initialisms are another type of abbreviation. They are often confused with acronyms because they are made up of letters, so they look…
Here’s a listener: Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Patti from Houston… Patti and her friends are debating about the serial comma — the comma that comes before the final conjunction in a list. Here’s a sentence that uses a serial comma: “According to the website Box Office Mojo, the top-grossing movies of all time in the United States are currently ‘Avatar,’ ‘Titanic,’ and ‘The Dark Knight.'” Whether to use the serial comma is a style issue, which is why Patti and her friends ended up in a debate. Do you always have to use serial commas? Although the British are…
This is shaping up to be a nasty flu season, which prompted a listener named Marc to bring up a regionalism I had forgotten about. He said, “My [girlfriend] and I have a bit of a contention…with the bug going on and people getting sick. When they call work, do they call ‘in sick’ or call ‘out sick’?” Back in 2009, I posed this question to my followers on social media and made a map of their responses. red=call in sick. yellow=call out sick. green=call off sick. blue=mixed. I noticed a few interesting things while I was going through the…
Here’s an interesting question from Lynn. “Hi, my name is Lynn, and I’m calling with a question about the use of an apostrophe. I’m wondering if there’s a special term for the usage where an apostrophe can indicate either a contraction or a possessive form, and I have two examples of that from my own small town. A hardware store which has been there for over 50 years has a wooden sign that hangs on the front porch that says ‘Today’s special,’ and below that is another wooden sign that says ‘So is tomorrow.’ And the other example is a…
Dave J. asked, “What’s the appropriate phrase—’beckon call’ or ‘beck and call’?” The correct phrase is “beck and call.” If you are at someone’s beck and call, you respond immediately whether he or she beckons or calls; it implies complete subservience. It’s an old phrase, originating in the late 1800s, during a time when “beck” was used to mean “beckon.” The problem is that the “on” in “beckon” sounds a lot like how we sometimes slur the word “and” in “beck and call.” Kind of like “rock ’n’ roll,”—we often say “beck ’n’ call.” The word “beck” goes all the way…
THE QUICK AND DIRTY If you follow Chicago style, spell it “dos and don’ts.” If you follow AP style, spell it “do’s and don’ts.” Here’s a small problem we can address today: The spelling of the phrase “do’s and don’ts” is inconsistent because that apostrophe in the word “don’t” makes it tricky. Generally, you don’t use apostrophes to make words or abbreviations plural. For example, you don’t use an apostrophe in “CDs” (the plural of “compact discs” or “certificates of deposit”), you don’t use an apostrophe in “1970s” (all the years from 1970 to 1979), and you don’t use an apostrophe in…