#englishusage — Public Fediverse posts

Saw "nonhabit-forming" in a book and wanted to parse it (nonsensically) as "forming of non-habit".

I wrote about these tricky hyphens once: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/non-life-threatening-unselfconscious-hyphens/

#punctuation #hyphens #semantics #writing #EnglishUsage

Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":

"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."

¹ complain
² issue, distribute

Source and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/

#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases

On the peculiarly Irish use of "grand", from Garrett's Carr's novel The Boy from the Sea

More on that usage here: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/a-grand-irish-usage/

#books #IrishBooks #reading #GarrettCarr #words #grand #EnglishUsage #Ireland #IrishEnglish

Words¹ misspelled² so often, even in edited text, that my copy-editor's heart does a little happy dance when I see them spelled appropriately:

ad nauseam, complement, its, just deserts, led, minuscule, principle, supersede

¹ In a broad sense, to include phrases.
² The descriptivist in me protests the implicit judgement, but "spelled in a nonstandardized way" is on the wordy side for a throwaway Mastodon post.

#language #spelling #words #EnglishUsage #editing #copyediting #proofreading

In the conventional spelling, "drinks cabinet", "drinks" is used attributively; there's no need to invoke the possessive case. But you do see occasional variation with compounds like this

#punctuation #apostrophe #EnglishUsage #writing #spelling

New eggcorn spotted in the wild: "sure up" instead of "shore up"

#eggcorn #linguistics #language #EnglishUsage #words #LanguageChange

Another day, another instance of Whom's Law of Hypercorrection, which I first stated here:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/12/06/whoms-law-of-hypercorrection/

#language #words #EnglishUsage #whom #grammar #hypercorrection #writing #WritingCommunity