Category: Blog

The humor is bad, but I approve of Mr. Thaves calling them malaprops instead of “malapropisms.”

…but he put “only” in the correct place, (next-to-last panel). But he should have said “The deck had” instead of “there were.”

Some words can go either way, depending on how they fit into your sentence. I ran into this pair of sentences in an excellent book I just finished, page 217:

The estimated global migrant population is about 244 million, about 3.3% of global population. In other words, 96.7% of humanity continue to reside in their country of birth.

A population (of 224 million) gets a perfectly correct singular verb even though it refers to millions of people (“population” is singular; 224 million is the object of “of.”). But then we have “humanity,” also a singular noun, in front of a plural verb, “continue.”

What’s up? Well, “humanity” is the object of “of,” so it doesn’t count. The actual subject of the verb is “percent.” I guess being 96.7 percent is strong enough to make it a plural.

What do you think?

We grammar geeks like to criticize this expression. We say it’s the opposite of what the speaker actually means.

And yes, I too prefer the direct approach: say what you mean.

But sarcasm is a recognized figure of speech; sarcasm is saying the exact opposite of what you mean. So if you want to be sarcastic and simultaneously irritate people who like good English, go for it. I could care less, but I don’t.

Aren’t we supposed to say puns are bad if they’re good?

The last post was all work, so this post is all play.

Okay, let’s go for two:

This post is mainly for the language geeks among us. I have occasionally used the expression “verbing a noun” (use the search box in the upper right corner), mainly because I had seen that usage, and had forgotten that we have a technical word for that! Backformation. In fact, to use “verb” as a verb is example of backformation. But there’s more to it than that.

If you’re interested, here’s a pretty good article about backformation:

https://curiosity.com/topics/backformation-can-make-you-invent-new-words-without-realizing-it-curiosity

Sorry, no comic today.

Sandhi is a Sanskrit word meaning “a putting together.” We get our word (ice cream) “sundae” from “sandhi.” Technically, the word refers to the effect that the end of one word has on the beginning of the next. This happens all the time in Sanskrit, I’m told, and sometimes in spoken English. (I suppose the choice of whether to use “a” or “an” before a word could be attributed to sandhi.)

Anyway, here’s a good example of using sandhi to make a joke.

You do know the scout motto, right?

Idioms are phrases in a language not meant to be taken literally. When we don’t understand something, we might say “It’s Greek to me,” whereas in Germany you’d say (in German) “It’s a Bohemian village to me.”

Here are some idioms whose meanings depend on context:

What are your favorite idioms? Feel free to put some in the comments.

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.

I don’t think I’ve run into this one before. I can’t say it’s wrong, but it doesn’t save you much. Last panel: