Although he doesn’t have the same worldwide name recognition as William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer – who lived, approximately, from 1343 to 1400 – is sometimes known as the father of English literature. Widely considered the greatest English language poet of the Middle Ages, he authored The Canterbury Tales and a …
There are very few universals when it comes to writing. What works for one genre might not for another, and what’s considered good during one decade can become passé during the next. That said, almost all the time, the point of writing is to communicate something. In order to communicate …
Modifiers – such as adjectives, adverbs, and descriptive phrases – should usually be next to the words that they describe. Especially when modifiers are more than one word long, people sometimes place them incorrectly. This can cause unintended meanings and even genuine confusion. Here’s how to get them out of …
You may be aware of the sometimes heated controversy over whether to use the well-known punctuation mark, the Oxford comma. However, the Oxford comma – used to separate the penultimate item in a series from and or, or – is not the only punctuation mark to draw ire. Here are …
Before the Vikings dramatically changed English, using whom was a perfectly acceptable English. However, now that grammatical case has almost entirely disappeared from the language, using whom is a strange-sounding holdover that many people don’t quite know how to handle. The general rule is that whom is an object pronoun while …
What is the singular they? You may have learned in English classes that pronouns need to match the nouns they refer to. So, for instance, you use she to refer to an individual girl or woman, he to refer to an individual boy or man, and it to refer to …
Is it possible to have an invented language? From Star Trek and Avatar you probably know that the answer is yes. However, invented languages are not just for the movies. The most successful real-life constructed language, with one to two million speakers around the world today, annual international conferences, and …
We’ve all been there. You’re about to use a word and you realize that it has a very similar sound/spelling/meaning to another word, and suddenly you are confused about which one is correct. These are commonly confused words for everyone. It’s easy to mistake some of these word pairs, especially …
France has influenced the world in a number of ways, from food and culture to architecture and style. There are also tons of words that we use every day that are actually French. Some french words are a bit more obvious, like bon appétit and chauffeur, but others you might …
English vocabulary has a variety of roots. Some words are from Germanic, some are from Latin (many by way of French), a few are from Greek. A few are loanwords from other languages. Partly because of this mongrel nature and because of the vicissitudes of history, there are no hard-and-fast …
