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Grammar Bite: Making Media Agree
It can be tricky trying to decide whether "media" is singular or plural.
When media is used to refer to "means of mass communication," should it be considered a singular or plural noun? According to Erin Brenner, founder of Right Touch Editing, the answer depends on whom you ask.
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Word CountWriters Talk About Writing
Ice Water, Ice Cream, but No Ice Tea!
Sometimes we lose the "-d" in compounds like "ice(d) cream," and sometimes we don't.
Ever wonder why we say "ice" water and "ice" cream but "iced" tea? And should there be a "d" in "didn't use(d) to"? Merrill Perlman explains when the "d " is necessary.
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If we divide up the short list of English parts of speech according to status, adjectives are at the top of the B-list. The elites, nouns and verbs, seem to get everyone's attention because without them, sentences wouldn't have a job.
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What would graduation season be without complaints about the misuse of the verb graduate? Usage guides these days warn against using graduate as a transitive verb, as in "She graduated college," or "He never graduated high school." The standard phrasing uses the preposition from: "She graduated from college"; "He never graduated from high school."
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Blog Excerpts
Different From, Than, or To?
Stan Carey, one of our regular contributors, has a detailed post on his Sentence First blog about different from, than, and to. Though the than and to variants are often considered incorrect, Stan argues that these are simply dialectal differences. Read the whole thing here.
The prolific British language writer, David Crystal, has produced another winner: A Little Book of Language (now out in paperback), which Publishers Weekly calls "the perfect primer for anyone interested in the subject." In this excerpt, Crystal explains how language changes, from vocabulary to grammar.
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The other night I was sitting next to an Austrian teacher of English at a restaurant in Brighton, in southern England. He was a bit puzzled by an item on the menu which offered "Pan roasted local skate wing, crushed ratte potatoes, sautéed spinach, caper, lemon & parsley butter."
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