When to hyphenate ‘up to date’

Editors and grammar geeks are strange people. The internet is full of these strange people shaking their metaphorical fists over punctuation points, word usage or grammatical constructions... But sometimes they're right!

By |2016-12-14T15:56:45+10:00January 11th, 2016|Did you know, Grammar, Punctuation|Comments Off on When to hyphenate ‘up to date’

Indian English: Preponing the tiffin

India has a lot of languages—according to a 2001 census, there were 29 different languages in India that had at least a million native speakers each. The official language is Hindi—but English in India is a rich variant in its own right.

By |2017-09-13T22:18:44+10:00November 26th, 2015|Did you know, Etymology, Grammar, Linguistics|1 Comment

The difference between i.e. and e.g.

After raging ad-hoc, non-traditional apostrophe abuse, one of the most common mistakes an editor sees is people using 'i.e.' and 'e.g.' interchangeably. First things first: they are not interchangeable. Well, they may be interchangeable in some kind of surrealist anti-grammar situation, where the desired effect is to get your reader to tear out their tongue [...]

By |2017-10-03T08:29:33+10:00June 21st, 2015|Did you know, Grammar, Misused words|Comments Off on The difference between i.e. and e.g.

Australian English—where the bloody hell did it come from?

How do we explain the general homogeneity of the Australian accent (almost no variation in a country 30 times the size of Britain)? What is Australian English, anyway? (Is it more than just the accent?) This post explores these questions, and influences on Australian English—from colonial times to present day.

By |2017-05-19T08:20:32+10:00June 16th, 2015|Did you know, Etymology, Grammar, Linguistics|Comments Off on Australian English—where the bloody hell did it come from?

Don’t separate a subject from its verb

See this simple sentence: The dog bit the cat. It's built of these basic bits: The dog [subject] bit [verb] the cat [object]. You would never dream of putting a comma after the subject and before the verb: The dog, bit the cat. [No. You wouldn't do this, would you?] But when the subject is a longer noun phrase, many people (I catch myself sometimes) will want to add a comma after the subject, just it feels like there should be a pause...

By |2017-05-19T08:20:53+10:00March 20th, 2015|Did you know, Grammar, Punctuation|Comments Off on Don’t separate a subject from its verb
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