Hello from quarantine!
Yes, I’m currently under quarantine here in Palermo, as part of the national lockdown in Italy to curb the spread of COVID-19. Continue reading
Quarantine
word meaning
True Bug Waits
While checking that I knew what I was talking about when writing about the words venomous and poisonous, I came across an interesting term: true bug. Continue reading
“None of them is” or “None of them are?”
Which of the following is correct:
It’s ok! None of the coffee is on my shirt!
I called the guys, and none of them is coming.
I called the guys, and none of them are coming.
(Oh man, usually when he asks Which one is correct? they’re all correct and he expects us to amazed. Watch)
Well, you might actually be amazed to find out that they’re all correct!
(*sigh* See?)
But why are they all correct?
Curating Content for Digital Influencers: the New Online Jargon
What do you do?
That used to be an easy question: a simple icebreaker when meeting new people. Now though, it’s more complicated.
First of all, since the economic crisis, people are understandably wary about asking the question, as we’re more aware of the fact that the answer might be nothing.
Second, for a lot of people who do have something that they do, it can be a hard to specify exactly what it is.
“Fill in” or “Fill out?”
Thinking yesterday about the question of whether or not we can use in and out together, and about phrasal verbs, made me think of something else. Have you ever noticed that fill in and fill out mean the same thing?
Literally Unbelievable
Is there a word as commonly misused as literally? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
In a literal manner or sense; exactly:
‘the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the roundabout’
‘tiramisu, literally translated ‘pull-me-up’’
The opposite of literally is figuratively. We’d mostly use this word if there were a chance that something we said could be taken literally, or if we wanted to refer to both figurative and literal uses of the same phrase. For example:
The mysterious blackout left people both literally and figuratively in the dark.
Yet if the meanings of these two words are so diametrically opposed, why would people make apparently obvious mistakes with them? Here are some of the most egregious mistakes I’ve come across:
English-Language Thoughts 