Beyond the Rhetoric

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 [...]

Words that sound the same but have different meanings can be a great source of confusion. Today’s topic was offered in a comment from the last Grammar 101 post, which also happened to be on words with the same pronunciation but different meanings. Today, we explore peek, peak, and pique. Peak refers to the highest [...]

When it comes to the English language, a single letter can make a monumental difference. In some instances, the single letter would only affect the tense, as is the case with sang and sung. In other instances, the single letter can dramatically change the meaning. Such is the case with canon and cannon. To make [...]

It was mentioned by friend of the site Ray Ebersole in my 2010 wrap-up that I should do a Grammar 101 post on this subject. He (incorrectly) said that my list ran the “gambit” when it came to the topics I cover on Beyond the Rhetoric. And from that grammatical error rose the subject of [...]