Beyond the Rhetoric

Putting aside the concept of body language and tones for just a moment, it is generally understood that we have two primary forms of communication: written and verbal. Moving from one to the other can sometimes cause all sorts of confusion and this is very common in the case of homophones. I can’t even begin [...]

Sometimes, when something sounds wrong in English, it’s actually right. This can be terribly confusing for both native speakers and for people who are learning English as a second language. A great example of this is the word “moneys” (which is also spelled as “monies”). In the strictest sense, “moneys” is the plural form of [...]

Maybe you can blame some of it on the texting generation. Maybe you can blame some of it on the Internet generation. Maybe you can blame it on the proliferation of lolcats and other online phenomena. Whatever the case, it seems that more and more people are spelling things incorrectly. And recently, I’m starting to [...]

When you’ve only heard and spoken a word, but never written it, getting the right spelling can be quite the challenge. This is particularly true with words that you don’t use very often. A great example of this is expatriate. Does the spelling look odd to you? It might. An expatriate (called an “expat” for [...]

I was having a conversation with my good friend Lesley Chang yesterday and she was telling me about how her workplace recently got a fancy new coffee machine. She used it to grab a hot chocolate and then she compared the experience to the Tassimo system. We both scratched our respective heads as we tried [...]