Grammar
interesting facts about language, etc.
Grammar
•Bantu names (East/Southern Africa) typically place the family name first and given name second.
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
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
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
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.”
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
•Chinese names are often formatted as family name first, then given name.
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
“‘Cis-’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘on the same side as,’ and is therefore an antonym of ‘trans-.’
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
•In Icelandic names, siblings have different surnames—typically patronymic, with a person’s name rooted in the given name of their father.
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
•Use “s” for all singular possessive nouns, e.g., Chris’s, Katniss’s.
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
Bryan A. Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage, also known to many in the editing world as the bible
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
•Do not use an apostrophe when a word is primarily descriptive rather than possessive: e.g., homeowners association, kids department, teachers college, writers room. [The word is acting more like an adjective than a possessive noun.]