thebrinkof
A word to the dumb
Be wary of the words you choose. They may mean something entirely different from what you thought they meant. Someone posted on Facebook...
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thebrinkof
Mar 29, 20153 min read
Spare the hyphen and spoil the phrase.
Don’t be niggardly with the hyphen. Doing so can wreak havoc. On the other hand, insert those little sawed-off lines in the right places,...
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thebrinkof
Mar 22, 20154 min read
Compounding the problem
Today’s topic is probably the most frequent grammatical error, which abounds in newspapers and every type of literature to be found. The...
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thebrinkof
Feb 1, 20152 min read
Sp-l-Check
It’s l-ementary. Pairing or paring the l In certain words, the double l is required. In others, depending on whether the language is...
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thebrinkof
Jan 18, 20152 min read
Untangling That Dangling Modifier
Like a yokel at a party of snobs, the dangling modifier looks so uncomfortable. He’s out of place and doesn’t know how to get the heck...
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thebrinkof
Dec 28, 20142 min read
Getting to the Bottom of Between
It’s become a full-fledged epidemic. Perhaps the best evidence of the deterioration of English language usage in America is the misuse of...
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thebrinkof
Nov 28, 20143 min read
The comma: common but crucial
Preventive Gerontologist, Dr. Arnold Bretsky, recommends this … That’s the beginning of a sentence from a newspaper advertorial urging...
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thebrinkof
Oct 18, 20143 min read
Getting all dangled up
Call them murdered modifiers, muddied modifiers, massacred modifiers – or, perhaps most accurate, misunderstood modifiers. They all...
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thebrinkof
Sep 16, 20141 min read
Say it again, Sam
What gives? There is another redundancy that pops up often in the print and broadcast media, in ads, on bloggers’ sites, and in...
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thebrinkof
Aug 14, 20142 min read
“Including” trips up the best
Including from, including on, including in, including at … . Enough already. What I wanna know is: including what? Spare the word and...
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thebrinkof
Aug 9, 20142 min read
The Helpful Hyphen
Writers who get too hyphen happy end up with cluttered copy, despite the apparently skewed vision of some who think they look so dashing....
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thebrinkof
Jul 31, 20142 min read
Enough! Leave “well” alone.
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” And God was and is everywhere. And so is the word...
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thebrinkof
Jul 20, 20141 min read
All HELP has broken loose.
HELP! Spare me from redundant use of the word. Redundancy reigns It is ubiquitous in combination with another verb, when either that verb...
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thebrinkof
Jul 8, 20142 min read
Cut the comma
Do you ever read a newspaper story, an advertisement, an essay or some other piece of literature and feel as though you’re being jerked...
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thebrinkof
Jun 28, 20142 min read
Hark up!
Okay, listen up! Which is it: hark back, harken back, or hearken back? Hark, harken and hearken all mean the same thing: to listen. And...
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thebrinkof
Jun 19, 20142 min read
The death of “died”
Do people die anymore? I mean, I know our life expectancy is on the rise, but surely the human species has not achieved immortality....
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thebrinkof
Jun 16, 20143 min read
El tranquillity
Tranquil — naturally About two years ago, I began seeing a holistically oriented doctor. His practice was based on prevention and...
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thebrinkof
Jun 7, 20143 min read
as well as …
“As well as” can be expected Weighty issue How often do you see a sentence with a series of items separated by commas, and “as well as”...
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thebrinkof
May 28, 20141 min read
The Uncommon Comma
No Commoners Here My all-time favorite cartoon appeared in The New Yorker a few decades ago. A woman in a long formal gown and...
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thebrinkof
May 7, 20142 min read
Bewitched, Bothered by Between
“And Shutterfly expects full-year revenue to be between $903 million to $920 million.” That sentence was in an investment newsletter...
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