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.
In the recent episode about vacation words, we said that you write the abbreviation for “rest and relaxation” with an ampersand—“R&R”—and I thought some of you might want more information about the ampersand because it’s an odd little symbol that used to be part of the alphabet, and it also turns out that its name is something of a mondegreen, a word based on a misunderstand or mishearing. The History of the Ampersand Nobody knows who invented the ampersand, according to Keith Houston, who writes the Shady Characters website about punctuation and symbols and has published a book by the…
This is one of a few questions I got about mondegreens after I mentioned them in a recent episode about the poop emoji. “Hi, Mignon. This is J.T. Morris from Evergreen, Texas. I’m a huge fan of Grammar Girl, and I just listened to the episode today in which you had a segment about an eggcorn related to the poop emoji. It was the word “holy” and the proper spelling of that in relation to that text. In listening to that segment, I realized I think I have been misusing the word “mondegreen.” I always assumed that what you referred…
Here’s an interesting question from a Grammar Girl podcast listener: “Hey, Grammar Girl. I have what I think is a familect story, but it could be just a local idiom. I’m not really sure at this point. I grew up in Eastern Ohio where we have a really odd dialect, but my family growing up always used the word ‘mango’ to mean a green pepper. So I didn’t know that mangoes were a fruit and a tropical fruit at that. Well, fast forward two years later when my nephew was having his first birthday party, and my husband and I…
A few months ago in a Slack channel for podcasters, one of my friends posted a grammar gripe. He wrote, This grammar pet peeve has been bugging me a lot lately because I’ve seen it used in very prominent places: “all of a sudden …” It’s supposed to be “all of _the_ sudden,” but simply saying, “suddenly” sounds a whole lot more grown up. It was interesting because he had it backwards. “All of a sudden” is the right way to say it, but when he heard it that way, apparently it bugged him. I’ve occasionally gotten questions about the…
A listener named Paul posted this kindly worded comment on Facebook. He wrote, “Mignon, I love your podcast. I have listened to every single episode. I love your sense of humor, and I love your pleasant speaking voice – except for one thing. Would you please, please, pretty please with sugar on top, stop mispronouncing the word “forward”? You almost always pronounce it “foe word” instead of the correct “fore word.” You have done it for years and years … If this is some regional variation of the word, then I apologize, but I have never heard anyone else pronounce…
A lot of people get confused about when to use hyphens when writing ages, and I think it’s because sometimes an age is a noun, sometimes an age is an adjective that comes before a noun and modifies it, and sometimes an age is an adjective that comes after a noun. When to Hyphenate Ages First we’ll talk about when you do hyphenate an age: You do it when the age is acting like a noun and when the age is an adjective that comes before the noun and modifies the noun. In this example, the age—70-year-old—is used as a…
What Is a Participle? Before we talk about what it means to dangle a participle, we have to answer the question What is a participle? It’s a tough question because participles have a few different jobs. Today, we’re only going to talk about their job that makes them look like adjectives. They tell you more about the noun that follows. Participles can be in the present tense or the past tense, and the present participle always ends with “ing.” For example, “dream” is a verb, and “dreaming” is its present participle. “Speed” is a verb, and “speeding” is its present…
Do you have trouble spelling the word “dilemma”? I’m nearly certain I was taught the wrong spelling in school, and when I got older and checked a dictionary, I was shocked to find that the word is spelled “dilemma.” Further, the only correct spelling is “dilemma.” I thought it was spelled “dilemna.” It’s not as if “dilemna” is a substandard variant or regional spelling. Dictionaries often note alternative spellings and sometimes even nonstandard spellings, but “dilemna” doesn’t even show up that way. The wrong spelling (‘dilemna’) shows up in a few books in the Google Book Corpus—not a lot of books—it peaked…
A listener named Salomé from Santa Clara, California, wrote, “I have a question regarding the word ‘sneaked’ versus ‘snuck.’ I religiously hammer into my students’ heads that ‘snuck’ is not a word, but I hear it used all the time (in public speaking and in the media). My students have even noted the instances and have asked me to explain. [Can you help?]” Salomé is right that “sneaked” has been considered the proper form of the word for a long time, but she and her students are also on to something when they notice people using “snuck” out in the…
Christians, Jews, and Muslims will all be celebrating religious holidays in the coming weeks, so it seems like a good time to answer questions about religious words. Do You Capitalize the Word ‘God’? One of the most common questions people ask about religious words is whether to capitalize the word “god.” The name or title of any specific deity is capitalized just like any other name, so when “God” is used to refer to “the one God” (in other words, in any monotheistic religion), it is capitalized. For example, you’d capitalize “God” in these sentences: Some Christians give thanks to…