Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan warns of the perilous ambiguity that can result from incautious use of the word that.  Continue reading...

I can only imagine how annoying the words Twitter and tweet are to people who haven't gotten in on the microblogging phenomenon. It's been over a year since I embraced all things tweet-y, and I like it so much that I continue praying to Zeus daily that Twitter never goes the way of Friendster and the pet rock. (Public service announcement: Neuter your pet rock. You can never be too careful.)  Continue reading...

English is my native tongue, language is my beat, and corporate America is where I earn my daily crust. Nevertheless, every so often I encounter an English word — in a corporate memo, speech, or email — that mystifies me. I've seen the word before; I've just never seen it used that way. I've always assumed the word meant one thing; here it obviously means something very different.  Continue reading...

A specter is haunting English — the specter of abused quotation marks. We notice this more and more in our reading and editing in the Lounge: the unthinking or misguided use of quotation marks where they are not required or serve no clear purpose seems to have become epidemic, perhaps nowhere more so than in the recently well-publicized open letter that the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers posted on the team's website, in which he responded to star player Lebron James' move to another team.  Continue reading...

Here's a little grammar quiz from Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing.

Pop quiz time! If I want you to play a song just for me and I don't want you to play it for anyone else, where in my sentence do I put only?

1. Only play me a song.
2. Play only me a song.
3. Play me a song only.

 Continue reading...

The dust has settled a bit since last week's Refudiate-Gate, when the blogosphere went into a tizzy after Sarah Palin used the word refudiate in a Twitter update — and then defended her coinage by likening herself to Shakespeare. Now that we've gotten the predictably overheated reactions from the left and the right out of the way, let's take a look at this particular Palinism with a calmer perspective.  Continue reading...