Recently on Twitter, Mark Allen wrote, “Despite once being synonyms, ‘enormity’ and ‘enormousness’ are different. Try to keep ‘enormity’ for something evil or outrageous.” I’ll admit right off that this usage problem interests me because I didn’t learn about the distinction until a few years ago. To me, they’re completely synonymous, and the idea of [...]

It’s a frequent complaint among linguists that laypeople use the term grammar in such a loose and unsystematic way that it’s more or less useless. They say that it’s overly broad, encompassing many different types of rules, and that it allows people to confuse things as different as syntax and spelling. They insist that spelling, [...]

The other day a friend of mine complained about the use of the phrase “most-awarded” in a commercial for the Jeep Cherokee, which called it the “most-awarded SUV ever.” It bothered him, he said, because “they are saying lots of Cherokees get given away as awards, but that’s not what they mean.” I was surprised—I [...]

I just finished filing my federal taxes with H&R Block’s free e-filing (which I highly recommend, by the way), and at the end I encountered some rather confusing language. After submitting my return, I came to a page asking if I consented to let H&R Block use my information for marketing purposes. (I always wonder [...]