Grammar Guru

You’re in the thick of writing and suddenly you freeze. Staring at your screen, you ask yourself, “Is that the correct word; it sounds right, but what if it’s the other word?”
     If that scenario feels familiar, you’ve likely fallen into the lexiconic equivalent of a tiger trap: Homophones!
     It seems almost cruel of English that there can be two (or more) words that sound alike, maybe spelled nearly identical, too, but mean completely different things. Homophones can be the hidden ordinances of otherwise good copy.
     There are homophones most of us learned to differentiate at an early age: dear and deer; to, two and too; sun and son, etc. Others, however, are trickier and can best even the most solid scribes.
     For purposes of this blog, we’ve chosen three of the more complicated homophones to feature. And since brevity is a blog crowd-pleaser, we’ll forsake the rabbit hole of listing every definition.

[Read more…] about Homophones! The Writer’s Tiger Trap

This post comes courtesy of something I saw my former AP English teacher (and writing mentor) post on Facebook this morning …

I do appreciate her humor. The question is, “What does Chapstick mean by regime?”
     The definition of regime offered up by Oxford Languages, publisher of the OED and its brethren, is: 

1. A government, especially an authoritarian one.
2. A system or planned way of doing things, especially one imposed from above.

     At first blush, one could attempt an argument for regime, if used in its second reference. Lest you think the copywriters for Chapstick are outliers, the term “beauty regime” is strewn across the internet. Yet, the mass repetition of an error doesn’t make it any more accurate.

[Read more…] about Regimen vs. Regime: lip balms of the world unite

The president tweeted late last week that, “…the best way to insure a [Sen. K Loeffler] and [Sen. David Purdue] VICTORY is to allow …”; the question we are here to settle is not the veracity of his tweet, but rather that of his grammar — specifically using insure rather than ensure.

As an aside, we acknowledge no shortage of near-similar sounding words (nay, homonyms) that are grammarian trapping pits: Effect or affect; vane or vein; heir or air. Even this corny joke: What did the hunter say while offering comfort to the distressed deer? “Oh, dear, there, their, they’re.” (I know, bad.)

Throw in assure, which means a person offering confidence that something will or will not happen, and you have a real milieu for the confusion. Or, not really, because while some authorities consider insure and ensure interchangeable, it’s a fairly settled debate – at least in America. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both assure and ensure came into English in the late 1300s, assure from Old French asseurer, “to reassure, calm, protect, to render sure,” and ensure from Anglo-French enseurer, “to make sure.” The word insure appeared around 1440 as a variant of ensure. It took on the sense of “to make safe against loss by payment of premiums,” in 1635. Before that, assure enjoyed that meaning, too. Today, insure has won as the word having to do with compensation for financial loss (e.g. “The violinist insured his hands with Lloyd’s of London.”). This use of insure applies on both sides of the Atlantic. The confusion that arises with insure vs ensure stems mainly from another definition: “to make certain that (something) will occur.” For example: “We wish to ensure the safety of our passengers. Some speakers of American English would use the spelling “insure” in this context, but most go with “ensure.”

[Read more…] about DO YOU ENSURE OR INSURE? YES, WE ASSURE YOU.

One term that seems to cause a bit of confusion, each seemingly lending itself to the objective of its meaning, is neither intuitive nor inter-changeable: “flesh it out” versus “flush it out.”

Of course, once it’s pointed out to you, you’ll never make that mistake again. I still recall the day in high school — in government class — when my friend pointed out to me that there is no “s” in anyway(s)! Thanks, Erin!

If you’ve been confused, here’s succor … you’re not alone. In fact, confusion over “flesh” and “flush” is prevalent enough that it made Vol. II of Merriam-Webster’s list of Top 10 Commonly Confused Words.

Saying these two words out loud, it’s easy to hear why they get confused; without careful pronunciation, “flesh” and “flush” sound nearly identical. Add the fact these two words can generally be used in similar contexts doesn’t help.

Get the skinny by clicking on the Read More link below…

[Read more…] about Do you “Flesh it OUt” or “Flush it out”?