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Foolish fire
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We had a tie in last week's quiz about how to punctuate the term commonly used for carved pumpkins, with 35% of you choosing "jack o'lanterns" and another 35% choosing "jack-o'-lanterns." So who's right? Let's ask Stylebot 😉 It's tedious, but we put the hyphens and an apostrophe in jack-o'-lantern. Another common format is "jack-o-lantern." "Jack o'lantern" is much less common. So who is Jack? And what's he doing with a lantern? Here's where we tell you what carved pumpkins and marsh gas have in common. "Jack-o'-lantern" originally referred to a phenomenon called ignis fatuus, which is Latin for "foolish fire." It happens when gas combustion in a marsh produces light. This usage of "jack-o'-lantern" dates back to the 1600s, and in the 1800s, Americans started using it to refer to the lights inside carved pumpkins. Jack-o'-lanterns aren't that scary, but with Halloween approaching you might see some things that give you the creeps no matter how hard you try not to let them bother you. How would you describe that fear?
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Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
We're back after the Thanksgiving break to revisit one of our first holiday-themed newsletters from 2022. Hope your holiday season is off to a good start! Now that we got our “Yule” pun out of the way in the subject line, here’s where we let you know that even though you’ll see both “Yule” and “yule” this holiday season, we recommend capitalizing it both on its own and in “Yuletide.” (And if you see it all the time and wonder what it really means, it’s basically a synonym for “Christmas.”) No...
Every one of our newsletters is designed to give you a writing tip you can use in your everyday life. See what we did there? If you remember last week's quiz, you might already know whether or not you got the right answer. If you need a refresher, we quizzed you on the use of "every one/everyone" and "every day/everyday." And most of you got it right! You needed the two-word versions of each term to correctly complete the sentence: "Every one of them noticed the mural as they walked past it...
It's hard to miss a mural that spans an entire block. It's much easier to overlook missing commas. One word would have changed the answer to last week's quiz, which most of you got right: Here's the correct sentence: "The mural, which spans the entire block, is being restored." However, if you change "which" to "that," the correct answer is none. Why? Which introduces nonessential clauses — that is, clauses that don't change the main point of the sentence. That introduces essential clauses,...