As a non native English speaker, I am astonished at the amount of English word pronounced different from their spelling.
For instance, 'Would' is pronounced like 'Wood', 'Whole' is pronounced like "Hole", and despite 'though', 'through', 'thorough' and 'thought' have similar spelling, their pronounciation is just vaguely similar, among many others.
I understand people pronounce words as they want regardless of spelling, but, is there a particular reason why this happens?
Thank you very much.
Given a numeric date range, such as shown below, which is the correct usage of ordinals? Should I use none, one, or two?
The event dates will be Dec 1-5
The event dates will be Dec 1-5th
The event dates will be Dec 1st-5th
Potentially Relevant:
Answer
According to "Grammar Girl"
When you're writing out a date like January 1, 2016 (in the American style), the day is written as a cardinal number. So you should never write January 1st, 2016. The weird thing though is when you're speaking, even though it is written as January 1, you say, “January first” (1). So when you are reading a date that is written January 1, 2016, you say “January first, two thousand sixteen.” That's probably why a lot of people get confused about how to write it.
According to which we should write dates as cardinal number and speak dates as ordinal numbers. This suggests that Dec 1-5 is the correct choice.
When attributing a quote to someone, you put a comma before the quote:
John said, "———"
But is the comma still used in the following sentence?
John's last words were, "———."
Or should there be something else instead? A colon maybe?
Answer
Many publishers still seem to use commas before quotations, as in your first example, but Larry Trask argued persuasively against doing so:
A sentence containing a quotation is punctuated exactly like any other
sentence apart from the addition of the quotation marks. You should
not insert additional punctuation marks into the sentence merely to
warn the reader that a quotation is coming up: that's what the
quotation marks are for. Hence the first two of the following are bad
style, and the third one is wrong:
*President Nixon declared, "I am not a crook."
*President Nixon declared: "I am not a crook."
*President Nixon declared:- "I am not a crook."
The comma and the colon in the first two are completely pointless,
while the startling
arsenal of punctuation in the third is grotesque. (Remember, a colon
can never be followed by a hyphen or a dash.) Here is the sentence
with proper punctuation: President Nixon declared "I am not a crook."
Adding more dots and squiggles to this perfectly clear sentence would
do absolutely nothing to improve it. No punctuation mark should be
used if it is not necessary.
‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ largely endorses this approach, describing the comma before a quotation as an ‘older convention’.
There is even less of a need for a comma in your second example.
Duplicate of:
“User accounts” or “users account”
“Employee list” or “employees list”
Should a list of tokens be called a “token list” or a “tokens list”
“BookList” or “booksList?”
Is it correct to say “lesson count” or “lessons count”?
"Thing count" or "things count"
And others
Which of the following are correct?
- Countries List
- Country List
It is the title of a web page where users can view the list of countries and select one.
I'm asking a question now, and I'm unsure about this:
I have an (Ruby on Rails site's) API which returns JSON data.
an API …a (Ruby …Must I use 'a' or 'an' in this case?
In other words, is the 'a' or 'an' only dependent on the following word not within parentheses?
When the phrase is used as an object, why so many native speakers are saying "you and I" instead of "you and me"? I'm not a native speaker but I thought "you and me" is correct. Not sure if this falls into the same category, but "Just between you and me" sounds more natural than "Just between you and I".
Answer
This is an example of hypercorrection, which is when native speakers make an accidental error in their zeal to avoid a different error.
In this case, the error that's being avoided is the error of writing "you and me" in subject position, as in the following sentence:
You and me are going to the store.
This is formally incorrect, although it's very common in contemporary spoken English. Because they have been taught that this is incorrect, many people hypercorrect and change "you and me" to "you and I" in all positions. That is, they incorrectly learn the rule about when to use "you and I", and so produce sentences like the following:
You and I are going to the store. [Correct]
He'll come to the store with you and I. [Incorrect]
E.g. "I get called Hitler in school." or "I get called 'Hitler' in school."?
Would quotation marks be needed for 'Hitler'?
What if it was an uncommon or nonsensical word like 'A123' or 'Gaylord'. Would the capital letter alone be enough to grammatically make its usage fine? What if the nickname is made up of multiple words like "Fatty Pig Face"?