When your significant other starts a conversation with, “So, we need to talk,” you know it’s over. You immediately flip through the pages of your relationship, scanning for any glaring issues or things for which you should be sorry. You’re on the defensive. You might even think about who gets to keep which friend after the impending break-up.
Some people take things literally. Kleptomaniacs take things, literally.
Literalists aren’t fans of idioms. Idioms are phrases with figurative meanings; they aren’t intended to be taken literally. Believe it or not, my friend, Byron, tends to take things literally; so, when I suggest we “paint the town red” on Friday night, he goes to his garage to get his paint rollers.
I’m about to hit you with a mnemonic device that will bring the armies of men into peace with the wood elves. That’s right, I have one device to rule them all when it comes to remembering the eight rules of capitalization, and it comes from “Lord of the Rings.” Is this going to be nerdy? You betcha. Are you ready? Whenever you want to recall what gets capitalized, just remember “Forgetful Bilbo Baggins took Pippin into Sam’s watermelon marmalade store.” It’s as simple as that.
I am a proud naturalized Hoosier. Although I was born and raised in Oklahoma (Boomer Sooner!), I’ve lived in Indiana for over a decade. If I’ve learned one thing during my time here, it’s this: Indiana loves corn. As a Midwesterner, I have an intense fondness for corn dogs, cornucopias, popcorn, cornbread, unicorns, cornerbacks, and even candy corn. And, although it pains me to say this, candy corn is not a vegetable. Don’t fool yourself, people.
Did you know that redheaded people only make up 1-2% of the world's population? There's a reason we are so scarce: the sun. I'm that person who can get a sunburn on a cloudy day. People have been known to get secondhand sunburns by just standing near me outside on a sunny day. I'm so white I get a moonburn.
Sometimes you can have too many of one thing — like presidential primary candidates, for instance. You can have too many toothpaste options at the grocery store. You can also have too many pillows on your bed. Organization expert Marie Kondo is a household name because of her minimalistic outlook. However, you don’t want to get rid of all of your pillows — right? You need at least one.
Do you want to work your way from the mailroom to the corner office? I can tell you’ve got gumption, kid, so leave it to me. I’ll give you some swell advice that’ll have you drinking gold-leafed martinis quicker than you can say “Scrooge McDuck doing the backstroke in a roomful of golden coins.”
You may want to sit down for this.
There’s a supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park called the Yellowstone Caldera that last erupted in a big way approximately 640,000 years ago. The next time erupts, it could potentially result in a large swath of North America getting covered in ash, creating a sustained volcanic winter that kills roughly half the world’s population.
John Lennon famously got in trouble in August 1966 when an interview from March of the same year dug up a single quote where he stated that The Beatles were (at the time) “more popular than Jesus.” Although this quote from a March interview was out of context, it led to many former fans burning Beatle records in big, radio station-backed bonfires.
As a student of words and grammar, sometimes I let a word roll around in my head like a sommelier swishes wine in his mouth. For the record — swishing is the technical term for what wine aficionados do so that wine triggers all different types of tastebuds inside the mouth. Lately, I’ve heard the term “winnow” quite a bit.
Can something sound wrong, but actually be right? Take, for instance, French fries dipped in a Wendy’s Frosty. This combination shouldn’t be good, but it’s actually a dollar menu match made in heaven.
I don’t attend many movies with groups anymore. Part of that is a life stage issue—most of my friends are married and have small kids. It’s hard to justify the added babysitter expense if we want to go out for the evening. Before that, I was always the guy who arrived early. Because of my promptness, I ended up saving seats for the whole group.
The following is a scenario based on real events. Any names have been changed to avoid embarrassment and grammar-shaming.
My friend, Ann, drives a van. Ann drives a tan van, and she’s married to Stan, but this story isn’t about him. It’s about Ann and her tan van.
Here’s our family setup: Carrie and I have been married nearly twelve years. We adopted our son, Miles, from Ghana in 2015 (he’s five-and-a-half now). Our daughter, Maeve (biological), just turned two.
Cliff from Wilmington points out how I wrote recently that I was “raised in Oklahoma.” First of all, thanks for not making some sort of joke about how Okies don’t know anything about grammar. After all, it’s a statewide mandate that all Oklahomans love our papaws and grammers (especially her synonym rolls).
Curtis Honeycutt, writer of the weekly humor column “Grammar Guy,” will receive a $2,000 grant through the Indiana Arts Commission’s Individual Advancement Program. The grant, funded by the State of Indiana in conjunction with the federally appropriated funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, will allow Honeycutt to pursue some writing projects as well as a literary-focused event in 2020.
There is most certainly an unspoken bond between redheads. We haven’t quite developed ESP in order to communicate with each other, but we do have a team of scientists working on it in a secret laboratory nestled in the Scottish Highlands. Redheads do, however, have one way to immediately identify and empathize with each other: the nod.
I’ve lived in Indiana for twelve years now, and, prior to that, I was born and raised in Oklahoma. In both places, I couldn’t help but notice the same strange phenomenon when people talked about shopping at grocery stores. For some reason, people tend to add an “s” to the end of the name of the store.
Americans like being the best at things. We’re the best at baseball, jazz, freedom, national parks—pretty much anything Ken Burns has already covered. Yes, living in the Land of Opportunity is glorious. Today, I’d like to award us (and, by us, I mean U.S.) a super-sized gold medal for smashing words together more efficiently than anyone else in the world.
