A World Without "Whom"

Arabic names are often formatted as personal name + father’s first name + paternal grandfather’s first name, each sometimes offset with bin or ibn (meaning “son of”) or bint (“daughter of”).

1982 [the first recorded instance of the digital emoticon]

Hopefully when used to mean “it is hoped” is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached.

Exceptions to this: •Corporation or brand names that are pluralized, e.g., General Motors’

the word OK was “born as a lame joke perpetrated by a newspaper editor in 1839.” In short, it’s an abbreviation for “all correct,” and a cool trend at the time—because what else was there to do for fun in 1839?—was to base abbreviations on misspellings or alternate spellings; in this instance we’re talking about “oll korrect.”

Descriptivists believe that language should be defined by those who use it; they observe and record, and so “correctness” is an ever-changing notion based on how people are writing and speaking at any given time.

two pretty straightforward examples: The duo is recording an album (they’re recording it as a unit), but The duo are going their separate ways (both members, as individual people, are planning to embark on different journeys;

“Everybody who speaks English decides together what’s a word and what’s not a word. Every language is just a group of people who are trying to understand each other...

It’s a widely accepted standard that job titles (e.g., president, governor, editor-in-chief) should be capitalized when they directly precede a person’s name and lowercased when they do not: The pope visited New York, but Pope Francis gave blessings to New Yorkers