You’ve never heard of the interrob...

It’s the Wild West out there—in the world of style and usage, that is: nouns becoming verbs; literally now meaning not literally; and now, made-up punctuation marks. I am referring to the interrobang, which I had never heard of until a friend recently told me about it. A “new social media icon” according to The Guardian, the interrobang is a non-standard punctuation mark—?! or !?—used at the end of a sentence that asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question. For...

14 words about words

As a word groupie, I love to collect new words. Lately I’ve been interested in learning about rhetorical devices and the words used to describe them. Here are 14 examples that will make you say, “There’s a word for that?” 1. Ambigram—a word that can be turned upside down and still be read as the same word. Example: MOW or NOON   2. Antimetabole—a word or a phrase that is repeated in the opposite order in the next clause or phrase. Example: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”   3. Collocation—a familiar grouping of words, especially words...

21 questions you might encounter at work

As a regular contributor to PR Daily, my posts mostly cover writing, editing, grammar, style, and usage. However, I sometimes get a random tangent that pops into my head, one that doesn’t necessarily encompass strictly writers and editors. Inspired by a recent XKCD comic—a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”—here are 21 questions I asked myself one day at work: 1. Why do people send emails with 10 MB attachments? 2. What does “econometrics” mean? 3. Who keeps adjusting the thermostat? 4. Does “fail safe” have a hyphen? 5. Why is the answer...

We’ve been verbed

I received an email in which the sender used “PowerPoint” as a verb. “Send me a detailed outline and I’ll PowerPoint it for you.” Oh, the humanity. Verbing, verbification, or denominalization is the process of turning nouns into verbs. It’s a perfectly natural process. As linguist Steven Pinker says, “Easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Today, we all Google, text, friend, blog, and bookmark. Verbing is how language evolves, but sometimes the results are...

7 troublesome verb pairs

“About half the grammatical errors made in writing are mistakes in the use of verbs.” — Grammar for Journalists In last week’s post, I wrote about the basics of verbs. These words power our sentences, but they can cause trouble even for the most experienced writers and editors. Test yourself on the use of verbs in the following sentence: Sarah (swam or swum) out, (dove or dived) to the bottom and (drug or dragged) the drowned child from the lake. Not sure of the answers? You’re not alone. Troublesome verb pairs trip can trip up anyone. Below is the sentence...