A World Without "Whom"

As a general rule, before you toss a few words in between parentheses, ask yourself, “Are these words integral to the meaning of a sentence?” The answer should always be no; they should further explain or qualify, as a service to the reader.

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”).

Long after we ceased seeking amusement by watching gladiators fight lions, we still use the abbreviation for the Ancient Roman libra ponda (“pound of weight”) to denote 16 ounces.

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.”

readability may be an issue, which is why I’d opt for pre-op rather than preop, side-eye rather than sideeye, and gun-shy rather than gunshy

As for oz? That one comes from the Medieval Italians’ word for ounce: onza.

“a colon means ‘that is to say’ or ‘here’s what I mean.’”

The BuzzFeed Style Guide advises capitalizing only the first letter of words in trademarked product and brand names, unless that name is made of initials (e.g., AT&T, but Ikea, Lego, Nike

Jane Straus’s Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation