The apostrophe is out to get you. That innocent-looking little punctuation mark you learned about in elementary school has been plotting against you all your life. It’s not like the hyphen, which is ...
In my career as a journalist and scholar I have written about sex – a lot. I have written about religion and politics. I have written about the millennium and the Holocaust. I wrote a 29-part series ...
I fielded a question recently about “minding your p’s and q’s.” I had used that expression in a column a few weeks ago, and it prompted an email from a reader named Christine who was curious about the ...
Let's face it, grammar is more important for some people than for others. An ambulance driver probably has more important things to worry about than whether to hyphenate adverbs ending in "ly." (FYI: ...
Wednesday was a dark day for the apostrophe, used in the English language to indicate the possessive case ("Joe's Pub") or a contraction ("I'm here."). In New York, apostrophes took center stage in ...
The English language would be better off without apostrophes. Yes, I know thats an extreme statement, and yes, I know its not likely ever to happen. But its true. Heres why. From our morning news ...
After VERIFYING how to spell canceled (with one l or two), a viewer asked us to VERIFY another grammar inquiry you might have been breaking for years. Beth Miller from Guilford County asked, "Why ...
Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...