Recent content by hopechest

“I didn’t say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame you.” This was a poster I saw online. A friend of mine, however, didn’t get the humor in it. English is her second language, and I had a hard time explaining it. So how would you explain it to a non native speaker?

That's a good example I didn't think of.

Great minds think alike. But do great minds think correctly?

What is the difference between the two words? Dictionary.com defines them the same and classifies both as adjectives while Wordsmyth.net and Bartleby.com defines legendary as an adjective and legendarily as an adverb. I tend to believe this over Dictionary.com’s answer, because while “legendary...

I have that book, but, if memory serves me correctly, it covers punctuation and grammar as a whole, a much much larger topic than this one. I'm hoping for some summarized rules regarding ellipses, hyphens, and parentheses and/or links dealing specifically with this topic.

Hi. I’m not new, although my posts are few and far in between, and I never properly introduced myself here. I’m a native English speaker, although that’s not to say I actually know English. It’s been my experience that natives of any language speak it fluently but not necessarily properly...

I’ve seen them used in published novels, and I myself use them. However I often see them overused and abused in fanfiction, so I try to used them judiciously, but recently I’ve begun to second guess myself. What are the rules for using the famed triple dots? For instance, one person told me...

Thanks. Ah, those darn prepositions. Fixed link: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/myself.html That is so true. It's like it's been ingrained into our minds that "me" is automatically bad grammar.

Is that proper, or is it better to use "me" or "I" instead of "myself"?

I'm talking about instances similar to: verb + ing = noun (gerund) It's not important, and as far as I know there are no other similar cases, but some friends and I got into an English discussion and this question came up.

Has anyone heard of National Novel Writing Month and it’s spawn, National Novel Editing Month? NaNoEdMo was later created to edit those “novels”, which is good, but part of me cringes when I think of NaNoWriMo. On one hand it is good to inspire people to write, but on the other I value quality...

While on the topic of passive sentences, it is my experience that many writers, teachers, and even word processing software packages abhor the use of the passive voice, but are there any circumstances in which the passive voice might be best? Are there times when the passive voice is preferred...

What were once nonsensical words often, with enough common usage, enter the English language. But even once it’s included in a dictionary it may for a long time before it becomes more than just slang and is more broadly accepted. One such recent case is the word “muggle”, a word coined by...

Oopsie. I should have been more general and asked, "Are there special names for any words when you add suffixes or, while we're at it, prefixes?" ^^;;

A simple question came up during a chat. I know a "gerund" is, "in English, a form derived from a verb by the addition of the suffix "-ing" that functions as a noun". But are there any other verb forms with special names when you add a suffix, such as "-ism" or "-ly"? P.S. This is such a...