Posts tagged as:

linguistics

Cityscape, Skyline Metropolis?

March 7, 2010

The suf­fix of one word can lead to so many other inter­est­ing words. In look­ing into the theme for Doo­dle Week on U3 this Fri­day I knew I wanted to draw some kind of city sky­line, a cityscape. That led to look­ing up other kinds of words with ‘scape’ as a suf­fix. That led me […]

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& What You May Ask">& What You May Ask

August 26, 2009

A blog about amper­sands. So what you ask? & what you should say!
A scribal abbre­vi­a­tion for and. Derived from the Latin word “et.” I like the amper­sand. I think it is often the most attrac­tive char­ac­ter of them all. This blog is an attempt to give this hum­ble lig­a­ture the respect it deserves.
Go forth and […]

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Spell Chucked

April 10, 2009

I would say spellcheck is let­ting me down but I know that’s just fluff­ing off. I’m let­ting me down and not check­ing enough. Rely­ing too eas­ily on your spellcheck pro­gram is not doing the best you can do. I will try to do bet­ter. Or, find a bet­ter spellchecker.
Really, it should just be a backup […]

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Still Confused After all These Years

April 3, 2009

Affect ver­sus effect. Do you know when to use which and why? Each time I have them sorted out in my mind I seem to read some­thing dif­fer­ent, or for­get what I had sorted out. Maybe it’s a los­ing bat­tle and some words are just too com­pli­cated. I found a post about them on Daily […]

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Spelling Style

January 29, 2007

Spelling is tricky all on it’s own. When you throw in dif­fer­ent lan­guages and cul­tures it gets down right com­pli­cated.
First, con­sider Eng­lish and Amer­i­can spelling. Then throw in Cana­dian spelling, which is some com­bi­na­tion of the two. Same for other coun­tries in the com­mon­wealth.
Have you seen words spelt with an s instead of a z? […]

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Mistaken Words

September 11, 2006

What are your words? The ones you always have to look up and check spelling or mean­ings? Look­ing at a book with “the most com­mon mis­takes in Eng­lish usage” I found a cou­ple of my own.

Accept and except.

These even sound about the same. Do you know which is which? When do you accept and when do […]

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Time to Buy a New Dictionary

August 14, 2006

When did you last buy/ get a new dic­tio­nary? How about a the­saurus? Maybe you splurged and got a rhyming dic­tio­nary too?
I espe­cially like play­ing around with my the­saurus. But, tonight, I dis­cov­ered how out of touch my trusty dic­tio­nary is. In fact, good old trusty is down right rusty. There is no ergonom­ics in my […]

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Cutesy Words

May 8, 2006

I do not like cut­sey words. “Peeps” “sumpin” and “was­sup” make me cringe. Per­haps I’m just show­ing my age, or being too par­tic­u­lar and unbend­ing. What­ever the case, I don’t like them and I can’t see myself chang­ing on this.
It’s inter­est­ing to think, the way the Eng­lish lan­guage evolves, some of these so called words could […]

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Musing with Words

May 2, 2006

Words are great. They come in a vari­ety of styles, sizes and shapes. They don’t need to be fed and clothed or taken for walks. They won’t beg for food at your table and they never pee on the car­pet. They have other ways of nag­ging at you, dig­ging into your soul and mak­ing you […]

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Proofreading is Boring

February 27, 2006

Proof­read­ing is bor­ing. If you’re a new writer I may as well give you the bad news now. It doesn’t get bet­ter with age. It’s bor­ing even though I’ve been writ­ing online for six years. It was bor­ing when I began. Well, maybe not that first week when every­thing was new and won­drous.
Ugh! Why can’t […]

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