Category
Through a small number of practices that reliably work, and they are less appealing than the advice people usually seek. Read closely, not just widely. Reading a great deal helps by exposure, but the
All three are fixed expressions, and they differ in what they do rather than in how set they are. An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be worked out from its parts. This is the defining feature
Because of a regular sound process called metathesis — the swapping of adjacent sounds — and in this particular case the "wrong" form is actually the older one. The history is the interesting part.
Prescriptive grammar states how language should be used. Descriptive grammar records how it is used. They serve different purposes, and most public arguments about language treat one as the other.
Because early in life the brain tunes itself to the sound categories that matter in the surrounding language, and distinctions that carry no meaning in that language stop being registered. The key
The strong version of this claim is not supported; a weak version has reasonable evidence. The question is known as linguistic relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong version —
Borrowing is taking a word from another language. A calque — or loan translation — is borrowing the structure of a phrase while translating its parts. Straightforward loanwords. English has taken in
A language family is a group of languages descended from a common ancestor. A language isolate is a language with no demonstrable relatives at all. How families are established. Not by similarity —
Because a thesaurus lists words with related meanings, and people use it as though the entries were interchangeable. They almost never are. What a thesaurus does not tell you: Connotation. Slim,
Because the choice between a and an depends on the sound a word begins with, not the letter. The actual rule: use an before a word starting with a vowel sound, and a before a word starting with a
Register is the level of formality and the style of language appropriate to a particular situation, audience and purpose. Choosing the wrong one undermines writing that is otherwise entirely correct.
From a joke about deliberate misspelling in 1830s Boston — an origin so unlikely that many competing theories circulated for over a century before it was established. The documented origin. In the
They are different writing system types, distinguished by what each written symbol represents. An alphabet has separate symbols for consonants and vowels, both written. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and
A creole is a fully developed natural language that emerged from a pidgin — and the distinction between the two is one of the clearest and most interesting in linguistics. A pidgin arises when groups
Translation works with written text. Interpretation works with spoken or signed language, in real time. They are separate professions requiring different skills, and practitioners of one are not
A language dies when its last fluent speaker dies, or — more commonly and earlier — when it stops being transmitted to children. UNESCO estimates that a substantial proportion of the world's roughly
The euphemism treadmill is the observation that a polite substitute for an uncomfortable word eventually acquires the negative connotations of the word it replaced, prompting a new substitute, and so
They describe three overlapping relationships between words, distinguished by whether the spelling, the sound, or both are shared. Homophones — same sound, different spelling and meaning. Their,
A topic sentence states what a paragraph is about, usually as its first sentence. Everything else in the paragraph then supports, develops, qualifies or illustrates it. Why it works comes down to how
There is no correct length, but there is useful guidance — and the most important principle is variation, not any particular target. Sentences. Plain-language guidance commonly suggests an average
A grammar rule describes how the language actually works. A style guide rule is a house preference chosen for consistency. Confusing them causes a great deal of unnecessary argument, because people
Plain English is writing designed so the intended reader can understand it the first time, at the speed they normally read. It is not simplified English, not dumbing down, and not short words for
They are distinct stages performed in a fixed order, and conflating them is the most common reason a manuscript gets worse rather than better. Developmental editing (also structural or substantive)
Because grammatical gender is a noun classification system, and many languages use one — it is only confusing to English speakers because English lost most of its own. What it actually is.