When you make up a word, you get to decide about its spelling. “Lego,” for instance, doesn’t have a plural spelling. If you want a plural, it’s “Lego pieces.”
Turns out “Jedi” is the same way. Next-to-last panel.
I’m not sure whether I already knew that or not…
Here’s a sentence about SpaceX:
Each outfitted with a quartet of arms and pair of nets, it was the first time both ships successfully made it out into the Atlantic for a simultaneous fairing catch attempt, having been foiled by high seas during a prior November outing.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-fairing-recovery-ships-port-return-battle-scars/
Now my rant:
“Prior” means something has more importance, for example, the senior exec has a prior claim on company funds.
“Previous” means earlier in time. So that sentence has the wrong word!
PS—”Successfully” in the second line is unnecessary. If the boats made it to the destination, the trip was by definition successful. You can’t have “unsuccessfully made it.”
Many words have more than one meaning. You can get humor by thinking up a situation when either meaning can make sense and you capitalize on the misunderstanding. How would you state the definition of these two meanings?
However, you don’t want to do this when you explain something. The rule is to be clear!
Whenever you write expositorily, spend some time thinking about how you might be misunderstood, and write to prevent the misunderstanding.
She gets it right.
“Bate” is derived from “abate,” and it means to restrain, hold back. Not much more to say, I guess. Forget about the worms.
Remember “court martial” and “attorney general”? —Phrases where the adjective comes after its noun?
The term for that is postpositive. Post means “after,” and positive means “positioned.” Here’s another source saying the same thing:
These adjectives are called postpositive, but that’s not because they’re positive words. Rather, the designation “positive” alludes to their position — they’re placed (or deposited) after the word they modify, for example, the adjective extraordinaire in “teacher extraordinaire”.
https://wordsmith.org/words/agonistes.html
I ran into a whole group of words that use this construction: heraldry! When you describe the details of a coat of arms, you use postpositive names (such as border engrailed). Here’s a chart:
Well, how to write a review that speaks ill of something. I presume your reviews are all well written. These example images are so colorful, I think you’ll enjoy them, and the color should help you remember the main principle behind writing a scathing review:
Don’t waste your time panning mediocre bad things. Save your effort for the really bad big fish.
Here’s a selection from a review by the New York Times restaurant critic:
“The shrimp cocktail tasted like cold latex dipped in ketchup and horseradish.” And “[I] look forward to eating the German fried potatoes as much as [I look] forward to finding a new, irregularly shaped mole.”
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/insight-what-a-peter-luger-steak-house-review-can-teach-lawyers-about-effective-legal-writing
Many times you’ll encounter things that aren’t particularly good, but they also aren’t particularly important.
If you gotta criticize, don’t waste your time.
Here’s a pic of the restaurant. I don’t have a picture of the reviewer, Pete Wells.
I remember Mrs. Baird, my high school English teacher, mentioning this topic, but she didn’t go into detail, and I can’t at the moment conjure up a set of rules about this beyond the extremely generic statement that verb tenses should not conflict when you have more than one verb in a sentence.
This sentence from a hearing aid newsletter reminded me of this.
Prepare in advance and have spares on you in case something is lost or runs out of power before you expected.
That should be “expect,” present tense like the rest of the sentence.
I ran into a question on Quora that raises this issue:
“The irony is that it would have been faster to “have taken”/“take” the back roads after all.” Is there a difference between “to take” and “to have taken” in this example?
The answer is that the sentence should use “have taken” because the tense matches “have been faster.”
Do any of you have a more formal explanation of why this is so?
He calls it “fat,” I call it “fluff.”
Please don’t do this!
BTW, if you’re a teacher, I recommend this comic. The cartoonist is a teacher, and he’s pretty good.
The young lady is not usually an example of good things in the Luann comic, but she illustrates a good point here.
You have permission to end a sentence with a “preposition”!
Actually it’s an adverb, or part of a separable verb, if you prefer. Use the search box on the upper right corner to see more posts on this subject.
Okay, so here’s the comic.
Maybe that last panel is a good illustration of why you can do this.
First the comic, then the comments.
A neologism is a word you make up. Literally, the term means “new word.”
Here’s the rule about neologisms: If you’re a native speaker, you can make up words all you want. The presumption is that you did it on purpose. But if you’re not a native speaker and you say a word that doesn’t exist, people will snicker at you because you made a mistake!
