According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, endangered animal species are “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of [their] range.” Applying the same principle to words, endangered words are used less and less until almost no one knows them anymore. Are your favorite words in danger of extinction?
Ambrosial derives from ambrosia, the mythological food of the goods.
Is poor writing an indicator that you will be less successful in your career?
Kyle Wiens, CEO at iFixit, suggested as much in a July 20, 2012 article (“I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.”) which appeared in Harvard Business Review’s blog network.
Yesterday, in honor of National Grammar Day, Harvard Business Review posted another article (“Grammar Should Be Everyone’s Business”) written by Grammarly CEO Brad Hoover.
Mignon Fogarty is the founder the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network, the creator of of the Grammar Girl website (one of Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites for Writers in 2012, 2013, and 2014), and the creator and host of the Grammar Girl podcast (Best Education Podcast in the 2012 and 2013 Podcast Awards).
The Grammarly team recently chatted with Mignon about grammar, language, and National Grammar Day (March 4).
You may or may not have heard of these funny little things: malapropisms. A malapropism is the misuse of a word that creates a ridiculous sentence, usually as a result of confusing similar-sounding words. This can create embarrassing situations for people, especially during public speeches. To get a better idea of how malapropisms work, check out some of the examples below.
Every grammarian has a list of grammar pet peeves. We compile new lists every year. However, some errors are insidiously persistent. Like coffee stains on a snow-white rug, we cannot seem to scrub them away no matter how hard we try. But we must keep up the fight.
Join us as we again leap into the fray against our arch-nemesis: the most-common-glaring-grammar-errors-of-all-time.
Your/You’re: This one has a longer lifespan than Dracula.
Language is language, regardless of the way you communicate. A new study by Psychology and Linguistics Professor Iris Berent at Northeastern University demonstrates that similar structures rule communication, and whether communication is via speech or sign is of secondary importance.
Basically, people adhere to certain patterns for what’s permissible in language and reject structures that “seem wrong.” By observing that research subjects with no knowledge of sign language mapped the rules of spoken language onto signs they were shown, researchers learned that ingrained rules play a bigger role than previously thought.
Since the dawn of writing, grammarians have been irked by sloppy and erroneous written communication. But over the past few years, it’s gotten increasingly difficult to go even a single day without seeing several writing errors. From street signs to Facebook status updates, unfortunate writing mistakes are omnipresent in both the real world and the virtual.
Over the next few weeks, the Grammarly team will use social media to determine the most detestable of all writing errors.
