Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles from 2015
To Whom It May Concern: who is a subject and whom is an object. Who acts and whom receives. Say what? Who is like "he" or "she" and whom is like "him" or "her." Who is collecting money for homeless kittens? He is! Then to whom does the money go? Send the money to him.
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How do you comfort grammar snobs? Pat them on the back and say, their, there. You see, they're easily comforted, but you have to get it in writing because those words sound alike. Their shows possession (their car is on fire), there is a direction (there is the burning car), and they're is short for "they are" (they're driving into the lake).
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The verbs lay and lie are total jerks. People often say lay when they mean lie, but it's wrong to lay around. You have to lay something, anything — lay an egg if you want. But you can lie around until the cows come home!
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While the mullet haircut takes us back in time, the word itself should not. Mullet was coined in the 1300s to refer to fish; the word's earliest use as a hairstyle name did not appear in print until 1994, when the Beastie Boys' "Mullet" "had a little story to tell/About a hair style that's way of life."
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
A Real Go-Setter
Why does "Go Set A Watchman" lead off with two verbs?
This week's publication of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's long-dormant sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird, has gotten a tune running through my head: "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." Two titles, same number of syllables, and the same syntactic structure, right down to the use of go plus another verb right next to it. But how do both those verbs fit into the place where just one verb should go?
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Knock knock. Who's there? It's an apostrophe telling you that who's is short for "who is." Whose silly idea was it to make these words sound alike? Who knows? But whose shows possession and who's is a contraction.
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It's a bird! It's a plane! It's is short for "it is"! But its simply owns something — it's soooo possessive. Its is the possessive form of "it."
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