A World Without "Whom"

•Most Indonesians don’t use family names in the way Westerners do; their names may be based on factors including geography, social standing, and religious influences.

The em dash will shine bright, however, if you’re indicating a break in thought, aiming for an emphatic pause, or setting off an aside that’s a step above being relegated to parentheses.

•In Icelandic names, siblings have different surnames—typically patronymic, with a person’s name rooted in the given name of their father.

•When a proper noun is already plural, the usual rule for possessives applies: The Smiths’, Rolling Stones’, the United States’ policies

A more important question is when you should link to a source. Doing so when citing any factual or quoted information that wasn’t delivered to you firsthand is generally a good idea: results of a study, an interview from another publication or story, statistics, additional examples, etc.

A collective noun, to be clear, is a noun that refers to something comprising a number of people or things—like the words family, group, duo, and team. Typically the verb that follows can be either singular or plural in form, depending on whether the individuals who make up the collective noun are acting together or separately.

generally use Latino rather than Hispanic when a broader term is necessary.

Italicize titles of films, but use roman type for franchises in the general sense or when they act as a descriptor: “He has tons of Star Wars memorabilia”

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.”

•Words that end in -es and are spelled the same as both the singular and plural form take only an apostrophe for the possessive of both forms (series’, species’