Grammarphobia

Q: More and more, I am hearing people say “not trying to” when they mean “trying not to.”

Q: I’m rereading Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes and came across something that has always puzzled me.

Q: The Wall Street Journal recently cited speculation that Russia’s aggressive military recruitment “preludes another draft.”

Q: The word “works” (meaning “factory”) is a hard nut to crack.

Q: I have noticed the absence of the subjunctive in lines from recent shows and movies.

Q: It seems as if journalists are now calling the initials of every organization an acronym.

Q: I would love to see a story on “performative gratitude,” a term for expressing gratefulness when you don’t really mean it.

Q: Why is the present tense, not the past, used in this sentence: “I hear you’re leaving the country”?

Q: I was discussing well-being this morning and wondered about its antonym.

Q: Where or when did the phrase “cutting corners” show up?

‘Q: I am used to reading older texts that use “my” before consonants (“my love”) and “mine” before vowels (“mine eyes”).

Q: News articles often say an issue is “on the table,” meaning being considered.

Q: I recently encountered a sentence about the need for “state and local leadership on immigration.”

Q: Why a “meteoric rise”?

Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking.

Q: Over the last decade I’ve been seeing an uptick in the use of “drop” to mean something new being released, like a podcast episode or music album.

Q: How can we get everyone to quit using “loose” when they mean “lose”?

Q: How was the definite article that we now see in the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes actually pronounced in Old English and Middle English when it was written with a thorn?

Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc.

Q: Robert Herrick uses “ye” during most of “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” but switches to “you” at the end.

Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related.

Q: Having been sucked down many a “rabbit hole” in my reading, I’m wondering how this figurative sense of the phrase developed.

Q: I am wondering how chimera has come to mean both “an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts” and “an unrealizable dream.”

Q: I was reading an op-ed that had this quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address: “That is cool.”

Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.”

Q: Can euphemisms turn into dysphemisms and vice versa?

Q: Was it ever normal to rhyme “misery” and “high”?

Q: I saw this headline over an NPR article: “VP Vance tries to progress Gaza ceasefire.”

Q: I say “fetch” when I want my Lab, Gracie, to retrieve something, but “fetching” may refer to her good looks as well as her retrieving.

Q: I’ve been hearing the word “hopium” used for an imaginary opiate taken to achieve unrealistic optimism, and “copium” used for one taken to endure hard times.

Q: After reading your recent article about Hank Stram’s coining a football sense of “matriculate,” I remembered reading a long way back that Stram also coined “Super Bowl.”

[Note: In observation of Christmas week, we’re republishing a post that originally appeared on Dec. 23, 2022.]

Q: I thought I might further muddy the waters of the wonderful word featured in your post about “dasn’t.”

Q: I was catching up with The Wire, the TV crime series.

Q: I’ve been noticing lately the strange use of “went to go” to form the past tense, as in “went to go see a movie,” “went to go swim,” and “went to go download a video.”

Q: Why did grammatical gender ever develop in the first place, and to what purpose?

Q: Do you think “you and I” should be “you and me” in the first part of Genesis 31:44 (English Standard Version): “Come now, let us make a covenant, you and I.