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Are You Among the Many Who Do This?
 Can you guess which word I see misspelled most often? Did you guess misspelled? You’re getting warm. Actually, it’s grammar. From my experience, I think it’s safe to estimate that 20 percent of the English-speaking world spells it with an –er ending.
Before anyone points an accusing finger at anyone else, we might want to explore the word’s origin (etymology). Could it have been spelled grammer at one time? If you look up grammar in the dictionary, you will indeed find that before Modern English times (1500 AD – present), the word was gramery. So the instinct to use –er has historical roots.
Like many words that are difficult to spell phonetically, you can use a trick (mnemonic) to remember the correct spelling of grammar: You do not want to mar your grammar. It may be a bit hokey, but we often remember tricks better when they make us roll our eyes.
The point is that we need to realize that the spelling of words is just as evolutionary as grammar itself. If you were to read Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales (c.1385), this is what you would see:
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writing of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non miswrite thee,
Ne thee mysmetre for defaute of tonge;
It’s hard to believe that these spellings (Englissh!) were all correct at one time. Today, we need Chaucer’s work translated.
So are we all “off the hook” with spelling? Maybe so, but at least SpellCheck, although it misses a lot of mistakes, will catch grammer.
Due to the E-Newsletter's large readership, we are unable to respond to individual English usage questions. |
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The Blue Book of Grammar
and Punctuation by Jane Straus
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Wordplay
 The Surprising Origins of Common Words
submitted by Tim Handorf of BestCollegesOnline.net
Jeans: Were you under the impression that blue jeans are 100 percent all-American? Think again.
The word comes from the French phrase jean fustian, which is a type of twilled cotton cloth from
Genoa, Italy. Jeans in the plural form was first commonly used in the middle of the 19th century.
Learn all about who and whom, affect and effect, subjects and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, commas, semicolons, quotation marks, and much more by just sitting back and enjoying these easy-to-follow lessons. Tell your colleagues (and boss), children, teachers, and friends. Click here to watch.
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