Jan Schreiber, a noted poet, critic, and translator, writes: "It's an old phenomenon — reaching for the fancy word instead of the plain one, and coming up with a word whose meaning is not quite what the speaker intended. We often smile at those who, as H. W. Fowler memorably put it, 'go wordfowling with a blunderbuss.'"  Continue reading...

Adverbs end in -ly and modify verbs. At least, that's what we're taught in elementary school. It's a fair start, but we soon learn that adverbs are more complicated than the rule implies. For a start, adverbs can also modify adjectives, other adverbs, phrases, and clauses. And they don't have to end in -ly, either.  Continue reading...

In advance of Valentine's Day, the dating site Match.com released some survey results indicating that good grammar is something that both men and women on the dating scene use to judge their potential mates. That finding led to a joke on Saturday Night Live that was supposed to illustrate "good grammar" but, ironically enough, failed to.  Continue reading...

Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review, guides us through some commonly confused words for common folk: "It's a popular mistake to confuse populace and populous. Throw in the similar-sounding populist, and even more mistakes are made. They mean almost the same thing, only different."  Continue reading...

Last year, Season 2 of the popular British TV series "Downton Abbey" yielded a bumper crop of linguistic anachronisms. In Season 3, now airing stateside on PBS, the out-of-place language has continued. There was a particularly glaring anachronism in the most recently aired episode: "steep learning curve."  Continue reading...

My sister has a problem with "passed" and "past." She recently commented thus on a Facebook post about the current flu outbreak: "When I flew this passed week, I wore a mask! I was mortified, but I can't remember the last time I flew and didn't get a cold, and I'm sick of it!" (I really wish I'd seen her in that mask.)  Continue reading...