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Captain Grammar Pants Correcting errors in grammar, punctuation, spelling, and more to help others...but mainly for the joy of it all.

10/16/2026

PARALLEL STRUCTURE helps in achieving clarity, which is one of the goals of good writing. A parallel structure means each verb or clause in a list matches. Yesterday I worked on my new book, cleaned my house, and prepared for today’s writing session. Worked, cleaned, and prepared all match because of being in past tense. Today I taught class, am hosting a potluck lunch for my students, and would have driven to a nearby town... Wrong! Bad writer! Today I will teach class, host my students, and drive to a nearby town. In addition, please don't mix verbs with nouns, as in “she ate a salad, a quiche, and drank.” Wrong! You, too, can match your verbs.

10/15/2026

The words SARCASTIC (Greek, “speak bitterly”), SARDONIC (Greek, “bitter laughter”), and IRONIC (Greek, “feigning ignorance”) all bring to mind specific turns of phrase and facial expressions. To be sarcastic is to say something hurtful that is on the edge of being funny, as in “Nice job with those comma splices, idiot.” Sardonic refers to laughter in the face of death (whether you’re doing the killing or the dying), as in “The gladiator narrowed his glance and grinned at the advancing lion.” Ironic describes contradictory circumstances, as in “it was ironic that the English teacher made so many grammatical errors in his own writing.”

10/14/2026

Many English speakers are uneasy with PAST PARTICIPLES such as flown, swum, given, begun, seen, drunk, written, rung, etc. Some verbs are the same form whether in present, past, or past participle (such as cost, cut, hit, let, put, and others). Things go awry, however, with irregular past participles such as “swum” and its use in perfect (I have swum) or conditional tenses (I would have swum). They are rare enough that they sound strange even when they’re correct! Your job, then, is to remember to use the past participle with helping verbs (have, was, and others), as in “this bird has flown,” and “I have seen it.”

10/13/2026

LEND (Old English, “loan”) and LOAN (Old Norse, “gift from a superior”) have an interesting history. Loan dates back to the 13th century and was always a noun. By the 14th century the word “lend” (as a verb) had risen in prominence because of its sonic relationship to bend and send. The etymological trail goes back to Proto-Indo-European “to leave,” which is pretty much what happens to the thing you lent (British English and abstract ideas) or loaned (American English). Through common usage over centuries, loan became a verb, particularly in banking. Just don’t ever quote Mark Antony (or the Beatles) by saying “loan me your ears.”

10/12/2026

The combination of PRESCRIPTION (Latin, “written as direction”) and DESCRIPTION (Latin, “written as transcript”) is what makes teaching and learning so interesting to me. When one is in prescriptivist mode, one focuses on what should be done. Parents and teachers both tend to lean fairly hard on being prescriptivist. On this page, much of what I do is prescriptivist. However, being descriptivist—describing how things ARE—is a real pleasure as well. Understanding how writers, composers, and artists learn the rules and break them allows us to focus on what lies between the two. That place, or moment, is where both innovation and inspiration can happen.

10/11/2026

ELEGANT (Latin, “select”) describes things, people, and places that are stylish, graceful, and often simple as opposed to riddled with details. It is a fine adjective to describe a musical composition, a hat, a garden, or a person’s aesthetic sense. ELOQUENT (Latin, “speaking out”) refers to the expressiveness or persuasiveness with which one makes a statement. Yes, both are adjectives. The intersection of the two words does occur in that a person or a piece of writing can be both elegant and eloquent. Alas, eloquent does NOT describe a hotel, garden, or hat, unless a specific and obvious message is being expressed from them!

10/10/2026

The root word –trude means to thrust, and is used in INTRUSIVE (Latin, “thrust in”), EXTRUSIVE (Latin, “thrust out”) and OBTRUSIVE (Latin, “thrust forward”). In each case, it’s a difference of perspective. To be intrusive is to invade someone’s space, conversation, or life with impunity, from the perspective of the person being invaded. Extrusive is a term used primarily in geology in reference to, for example, igneous rocks (fine-grained volcanic rocks formed by cooling magma) that thrust out of the ground. To be obtrusive draws from the perspective of the invader with very little thought of what blunders, social or otherwise, might be committed.

10/09/2026

The prefix UNI- (Latin, “one”) shows up in English usage as a modifier of the following word (as is true for prefixes in general). Unicorn (one horn), uniform (one design), and unicycle (one wheel) fall under this category. The potential confusion with this prefix arises from its use not only to indicate one, as in solo, but also to indicate “joined as one,” as in union. This second explanation might help to explain why we have such words as unisex (suitable for both sexes), universe (as one, turned), and unilateral (making a decision alone that affects everyone). This usage is the reason I am startled when my British friends discuss the “uni,” meaning university!

10/08/2026

I am reminded of the difference between HOMOPHONE (Greek, “same sound”) and HOMONYM (Greek, “same name”). Two homophones are pronounced the same way but have a different spelling and meaning, as in read and reed. Homonyms have the same pronunciation and spelling but different meanings, as in table (the noun) and table (the verb). HOMOGRAPHS (Greek, “same writing”) include words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, as in refuse and refuse. To distinguish them, think -phone/sound, -nym/name, and -graph/spell. You’d really need a Venn diagram to see how these intersect!

10/07/2026

DISTINCT (Latin, “distinguished”) is distinct from DISTINCTIVE (uh oh: Latin, “distinguished”). The two adjectives are distinct from DISTINGUISHED (French, “separated out”). First, distinct means that one thing is clearly different from other things, as in “the color violet is distinct from green or orange.” Distinctive means the characteristic of something that separates it from other things, as in “the dark purple COLOR of the blackberries is distinctive in that scarlet bowl.” Lastly, the verb distinguish means to separate one thing from another, as in “I am perfectly capable of distinguishing it’s from its.”

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