If you’ve only heard the word gist aloud, you might not know how to spell it. Both gist and jist might seem like good choices, but one of them is not.
When we say we want to get the gist of something, we’re talking about its essence or main point:
New words come into use, old words slowly fade away. It’s a natural, all-too-familiar cycle. We’ve already covered words that may be headed toward extinction. Here are five more words in various stages of endangerment. But, who knows? Maybe some of them can still be saved—but should we save all of them?
Tag isn’t a word that’ll disappear anytime soon, as long as things still cost money and come with price tags.
Whilst and while are two words with identical meanings—usually. But you can’t always use whilst instead of while.
Typically, Brits use whilst and Americans use while. That’s the main difference. When used as a conjunction or an adverb, while and whilst are interchangeable:
Reflexive pronouns are words ending in -self or -selves that are used when the subject and the object of a sentence are the same (e.g., I believe in myself). They can act as either objects or indirect objects. The nine English reflexive pronouns are myself, yourself, himself, herself, oneself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, and themselves.
Grammatical terms might seem complicated and a bit arbitrary when you first hear them, but they really aren’t, once you get to know them.
It might start out resembling a normal workday.
Being a freelance writer is easy, and nothing ever goes wrong, you tell yourself.
You’re there. The requisite coffee is there. The well-worn keyboard sits just below the screen, which pulses steadily with notifications of various tasks, deadlines, and expectations. You’re used to this. Some part of you might even feed on it.
But then, something abnormal happens.
A nonrestrictive phrase adds a little bit of extra (but not essential) information about a noun phrase that you’ve already mentioned in your sentence.
Last year, Grammarly polled our social audiences to see if they supported gender-neutral pronoun usage. The results were a bit surprising: more than half of the audience polled felt that the idea of gender-neutral pronouns was a nonstarter.
With this knowledge, I’d like to make an appeal to our audience: consider the singular they. Language has changed a lot in the last year, with the singular they being voted the most important word of the year, and numerous dictionaries adding gender-neutral usage notes.
