One of the most cherished beliefs of people who collect facts about English is that Shakespeare is the greatest linguistic inventor the language has ever seen. You cannot travel very far online before coming across some article or listicle asserting that he was responsible for giving birth to some exceedingly large portion of our vocabulary, and giving examples of numerous common words that began with …
You may have heard coworkers or acquaintances refer to an inconsequential or irrelevant point as a moot point, or maybe you’ve heard mute point instead. Fans of the TV show Friends may have heard a third variation: moo point (because, according to Joey, a cow’s opinion doesn’t matter). But which expression is correct, and what exactly does it mean? The correct phrase is moot point. …
Do you bring food to a party, or do you take food to a party? The terms bring and take are often confused, and for good reason. Both words describe the movement of something from one location to another.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely viewed as having been the inventor of the term jazz age. Numerous books, academic and otherwise, have proclaimed that Fitzgerald named the decade, coined the term, invented the phrase, and so on and so forth. There is no doubt that the phrase became much more widely used after the publication of Fitzgerald’s 1922 book Tales of the Jazz Age, and …
Are all right and alright interchangeable? All right has a range of meanings including: “safe,” as in Are you all right? “reliable; good,” as in That fellow is all right. as an adverb, it means “satisfactorily,” as in His work is coming along all right. “yes,” as in All right, I’ll go with you. Is alright a real word? The form alright is a one-word …
