There is a well-known line, often attributed to Samuel Johnson, but preceded and followed by myriad others, that the pun is the lowest form of humor. If so, the limerick, a form of verse that depends on clever assonance and double entendre, is certainly the lowest form of poetry. In this post, we will shine a spotlight on the limerick, and see if the cockroaches scurry.
To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the limerick originated in England sometime before the fifteenth century.
When something important and meaningful happens to someone, it’s nice to acknowledge it. But before we do, we need to double-check our spelling.
There’s just one way to spell it, and that’s congratulations, with a T. This word came into English from Latin, where it was formed by combining the prefix com-, meaning “with,” to the root gratulari, meaning “give thanks” or “show joy.”
Guest post by Matt Banner
Today’s digital age has brought back the craft of writing, but at a cost. With the rising popularity of hashtags, tweets, emoticons, and shorthand phrases like the ever-present “LOL,” it seems like good grammar has gone out the window. At the end of the day, does grammar still matter in this digital age?
For the foreseeable future, the answer is yes. While you can’t take ten steps on the Internet these days without running into a typo-ridden blog post or a social media post that looks like Freddy Krueger took his clawed hands to the language, there’s still a place for those who hold grammar in high regard.
April 13 is National Scrabble Day! How can a board game become so popular that it actually has its own holiday? Those who have played Scrabble know that it’s an addictive, brain-busting game that delights word nerds and language lovers. There’s even an annual US National Scrabble Championship and World Scrabble Championship!
Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, last year’s winner of the National Scrabble Championship, won $10,000 after beating a five-time champion.
A coordinating conjunction is a word that joins two elements of equal grammatical rank and syntactic importance. They can join two verbs, two nouns, two adjectives, two phrases, or two independent clauses. The seven coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so.
The best way to remember the seven coordinating conjunctions is by using the acronym FANBOYS:
The great English writer Charles Dickens is known for his well-crafted characters. While some of the characters we meet in Dickens’ novels are endearing heroes, others are sinister villains. Here are three Dickens characters you would never want to meet.
Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist A career criminal, violent abuser, and murderer, Bill Sikes is at the top of the list of characters to avoid.
Every child grows up with a certain book that resonates with him or her, but there are some books that have a reached a level of such popularity that they become staples in the childhoods of people everywhere. Reading is an important experience as a kid; it fuels the imagination and implants moral suggestions for how to deal with the world from a young age. That makes children’s books powerfully suggestive and entirely important in the life of a child.
