Beyond the Rhetoric

The English language is filled with all sorts of different rules for how you conjugate verbs or how you convert one type of word into another. For example, it is generally true that if you add “-ed” to the end of a verb, you effectively form the past tense form of that verb. The problem [...]

Perhaps it would be better if each of the words in the English language had just a single meaning. That way, there would be absolutely no ambiguity when you used any given word, because it would only have one possible interpretation. For better or for worse, that is not the case. One prime example of [...]

The English language being what it is, you’re going to come across words that seem to have similar meanings and they’re used under similar contexts, but they cannot be used interchangeably. Tasty and tasteful do not mean the same thing. Another great example of this is beneficiary and benefactor. How are these words different and [...]

When you make another copy of all the pictures you have stored on your hard drive, did you make a back up or a backup? What about the actual act of making that extra copy? Did you backup that data or did you back up that data? While both “back up” and “backup” are vocalized [...]

As I’ve said many times before in these Grammar 101 posts, there are many words in the English language that either sound exactly the same or sound pretty similar to one another. It’s understandable that you might confuse some of these word pairs, especially if they are words that you don’t use on an everyday [...]