Like many of you, the recent spate of spring sunshine has enticed me out into the garden to do some much-needed tidying and cutting back in the borders. While snipping away with my secateurs, it occurred to me that copy-editing and gardening have quite a lot in common. Allow me to explain… What is copy-editing? […]
Following the historic EU referendum result, I keep hearing – and reading – that “the UK is leaving Europe”. Or that “Britain is leaving the EU”. Both of these statements are, in fact, incorrect. And difficult for a pedant like me… I’ve been a bit remiss with my blogging lately, but I felt compelled to publish one […]
I’ve blogged on the subject of names a few times. But thus far I’ve neglected to cover the singular most important one to me: my own. So this post aims to put that right. Even if it is a little indulgent. In…
If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll be familiar with my idioms series. This features everyday phrases and sayings in the English language that have strange meanings – and often even stranger origins. Each post in the series focuses on…
Hello, my name is Geraldine and I’m a Twitter newbie… After much deliberation and shilly-shallying, I finally signed up to Twitter about two weeks ago. Unfortunately I couldn’t get @EveryWordCounts for my user name as it had already gone, so my Twitter handle is @EWC_wordsmith. Joining Twitter was a sort of New Year’s resolution as I’m already fairly active […]
You know that idiom that refers to comparing yourself to your neighbours as a benchmark for social class or material wealth? Whereby failure to ‘keep up’ with their practices or possessions is perceived as evidence of socio-economic or cultural inferiority. How do you think it should be written? Not like this (spotted in a recent […]
One of the many differences between British English and American English that’s always intrigued me is autumn vs. fall. We use winter, spring and summer on both sides of the pond. Yet we can’t seem to agree what to call this time of… Posted in Language Tagged with: AmE, autumn, BrE, fall, terms
I just wanted to personally thank you for your work on our content project, you’ve done a fantastic job, and I’m really pleased with the end result. I’ll be sure to use you again in the future. Related Posted in Uncategorised
To help you feel in a suitably romantic mood for Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d collate some English expressions and idioms about love. How love came about As you might expect, love is almost as old as time… According to…
Every now and then I undertake a large proofreading job, such as a manual or an annual report. The most recent was a meaty 90,000-word operations manual. What I’ve noticed is that the same writing mistakes crop up time and…
Out of the blue, the thought occurred to me the other day that it’s been 18 years – give or take a couple of weeks – since I set up my stall as a freelancer after working in-house for several years. It’s really quite hard to believe that it’s been that long since I took […]
Introducing the first in a new series of mini blog posts about common writing mistakes. The difference between compliment vs. complement is one that catches a lot of people out. I often see them used incorrectly, as in “complimentary therapies”,…
Following on from my previous post on names for plimsolls, attention now turns to what we Brits call the humble bread roll. As I suspected, there’s a far greater variety of names for bread rolls than there is for elasticated… Posted in Names Tagged with: bread, rolls
As a standalone word, a graph is a diagram showing the relation between variable quantities – usually measured along a pair of axes at right angles. In Linguistics, it refers to a visual symbol representing a unit of sound or…