If you chose "pouring over" in last week's quiz, did you associate the act of studying intently with poor posture? Perhaps pore and pour's fellow homophone can help you remember the correct phrase. Almost everyone who took last week's quiz correctly identified "pour" as the verb to use for serving drinks. But nearly a third of you chose "pouring over" for the act of studying the audit logs, when the correct phrase is poring over. When you hear the phrase "poring over," you might picture someone hunched over papers, as if their head is being poured onto the desk. But one meaning of the word "pore" is to study intently, so "pore over" has nothing to do with poor posture. All right, this week's quiz will have you poring over punctuation marks.
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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 ๐ 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...
It's officially falltime, and yes, you read that right. The answer to last week's quiz ("Which of these is NOT a word?") was autumntime. But most of you <ahem> fell for "falltime," which gets a listing in Merriam-Webster (our default dictionary), while "autumntime" does not. Neither "falltime" nor "autumntime" is in wide use compared to the other seasonal terms. Why? It might have to do with the age of the words "fall" and "autumn." English speakers started describing seasons at their...
If it's been, um, a while since you've reviewed the rules for a while and awhile, it's easy to get confused about when to include a space and when not to. "Awhile" is an adverb, while "a while" is a noun phrase. So in last week's quiz, the correct answer was "awhile," but most of you chose "a while": If the sentence had been, "Once they arrived, they made it clear they planned to stay for _______," then the answer would have been "a while." And that's the tip in our style guide: Use "a while"...