Grammar

I always learn something when I read Yahoo! News; mostly I learn what not to do. The site serves as a great reminder of the kind of mistakes I could be making if I’m not careful, like capitalizing a random word: Or committing a grammatical crime like failing to match a verb to its subject: Or confusing a murder with a murderer: Filed under: Capitalizing, Subject-Verb Agreement, Verbs, Wrong words Tagged: bad grammar, capitalization, editing, grammar, grammar mistakes, incorrect grammar, proofreading, Subject-Verb Agreement, typos, verb, wrong word, Yahoo!, Yahoo! News

This deli in Kitchener, Ontario, may have the best ribs in town, but it seems to have the worst punctuation. Thanks to Josh for sending this one in.

It’s one of the 100 most frequently misspelled words, so maybe we should expect to see it misspelled in a headline on Yahoo!. This time it’s in Yahoo! Sports‘ “Prep Rally”: You’d think that the writer or editor or proofreader would know that the word can accommodate one more M. Filed under: Misspellings Tagged: accommodate, bad spelling, editing, incorrect spelling, misspelling, Prep Rally, proofreading, spelling, spelling mistake, writing, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Sports

COMPLIMENT/COMPLEMENT Here are two words that are pronounced the same but which have different meanings. What is the etymology of each word? Define “compliment” and “complement”. What part of speech is each word? Create sentences that demonstrate the meanings of “compliment” and “complement“. BONUS: Define etymology and relate it to the two words above to receive a GOLD STAR. TODAY’S WORD The word for today is “disingenuous”. What part of speech is “disingenuous”? How many syllables are there in “disingenuous”? Define “disingenuous” and use it in a sentence. Try to use “disingenuous” in your speech today. CORRECTIONS & EXPLANATIONS Corrections and explanations for this week’s entries will be posted tomorrow, Friday.

Here’s a question for you: Why do the writers and editors at Yahoo! Shine think that workout is a verb? The verb is work out. The noun is one word: workout. Think of it this way: If workout were a verb its past tense would be workouted. Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: bad spelling, incorrect spelling, misspelling, proofreading, Shine, spelling, spelling mistake, verb, workout, wrong word, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine

From Gabe Wyner come photos of a menu in Arcos de la Frontera, whose English version is full of the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary. For example: In the Spanish version of the menu, that one of course is Calamares en su tinta. Lexicographical parentheses come up again in the various dishes characterized as Revuelto de X, where revuelto here means "scrambled", and (I think) refers to scrambled eggs with various other ingredients, but has been translated as "In a mess (Untidy)": Another poetic fragment involves several dishes characterized as "Attacked" of this and that, resulting from the fact that saltear can mean "rob, assault" as well as "sauté": A more subtle misconnection is the translation of guarnición as "garrison" rather than "garnish": The full English and Spanish versions of this menu page are here and here. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what you'd get if you ordered "Iberian Secret" or "Iberian Pen (Feather)" from the "Meets" section:

Language portal bab.la is holding its annual competition of top language lovers, and Sentence first is honoured to appear in the Language Professionals category. Click the image below to see the 100 shortlisted (if that’s not an oxymoron) and vote for Sentence first or another blog of your choice: My Twitter page (@StanCarey) was also selected, so if you’re feeling generous you can vote for me here: Though I placed respectably last year (see the badges in the sidebar), my expectations in these contests are modest; tireless self-promotion is not my strong point. But they’re a good way to find new language writers, and they’re also an opportunity to welcome new visitors. Finally, if you’re in a voting or browsing kind of mood, there are also polls for Facebook pages and language-learning blogs. Filed under: blogging, language, writing Tagged: bab.la, blogging, blogs, competition, language, language news, Lexiophiles, polls, Twitter, writing

The other day during class I wrote a table of the conjugation of four tenses in positive, negative and question forms on the board. The students enjoyed the visual overview of all tenses side by side which allowed them to see the minor differences between the various tenses quickly. At the end of the lesson, Tarsis (an English learning pilot from Brazil) asked me for the chart. What a great idea! I've put together these tense tables of all 12 tenses - 13 if you count the future with 'going to' - in the positive, negative and question form on one page. Another great way to review tenses is to use the visual tense charts providing time clues to usage. FInally, you can also get an overview of all the tenses and the relation to past, present and future by using this tense timeline.

A team of researchers at MIT has devised a series of games to crowdsource the meaning of verbs. They’re gathering data on how particular verbs are used (e.g., does to strike always denote physical contact). There are currently four different games available with more promised. Crowdsourcing the analysis of data is one of the hot trends in science. Galaxy Zoo may be the most successful and famous of these efforts. Dictionaries have been crowdsourcing the collection of citations for well over a century, but now linguistic researchers are bringing the power of massed human minds to definition writing. You do have to register to participate in VerbCorner, but the the info you give is pretty minimal. (Some basic demographic info, like age and country of origin, and an email address for password recovery.) (Tip o’ the Hat to the Lousy Linguist) [Discuss this post]

There’s nothing wrong with this caption on Yahoo! Shine that moving the apostrophe to the left wouldn’t fix: The apostrophe should be used to show the omission of digits (in this case, 19), and not to form the plural of a decade: ’60s is correct. Filed under: Apostrophes, Plurals, Punctuation Tagged: apostrophe, editing, incorrect punctuation, plurals, proofreading, punctuation mistakes, Shine, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine