Beyond the Rhetoric

I’ve written several editions of Grammar 101 that focus on word pairs (or word trios) that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. You might remember the post on there, their and they’re, for example. Today, we’re approaching a similar topic, except the exact same letters are used in exactly the [...]

Words that sound the same when spoken, but are spelled differently and have different definitions, can present quite the challenge when it comes time to write them down. Homophones are particularly challenging if one or more of the variations is used more seldomly than its more common counterparts. We’ve seen this with copyright and copywrite, [...]

Earlier this week, the CBC reported that Ottawa “will vigorously lobby against” the proposal put forth by the United States Department of Homeland Security to levy a fee for every vehicle or pedestrian that crosses a land border into the country. This would be true both at the Canada-US border and the Mexico-US border, charging [...]

When two words sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings, it can be easy to confuse the two. This is further exacerbated when the two words are seemingly related in some way. That is exactly the case with copyright and copywrite, a couple of terms that are particularly relevant to my [...]

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 [...]