Posts Tagged: grammar

  • A whimsical cartoon of Emily Dickinson hitting a man in a suit with an em-dash. The caption reads "If you think my poetry is written by AI i will beat your brains out with an em-dash".

    Em-dash—a defence

    Lately (October 2025) the em-dash has been cast as a sign of AI generated text. It isn’t. It is a mainstream punctuation mark much beloved by many writers including myself. I love the em-dash for lots of reasons. I do tend to overuse it but that is my prerogative. One of the reasons that many […]

  • Illustration of Aristophanes of Byzantium looking at the stars as asterisks AI generated

    Asterisk

    Studying stars is one of the oldest of the sciences. Humans have stared at the night sky from and tried to understand their meaning from before prehistory. Indeed it is believed the word “star” is one of the earliest words ever used along with words for mother and father. But I am concerned not with […]

  • to boldly split your infinitive-- To explore strange new worlds To seek out new life and new civilisations To boldly go where no man has gone before Star Trek

    To boldly split the infinitive

    Most of us were taught grammar in a very basic way—we can recognise nouns, verbs, adjectives and how to put them together in sentences. But we were forever in fear of splitting our infinitives even though most of us didn’t even know what it meant, let alone when we were doing it. Even now, when […]

  • Purple emojis from Madrigal

    Why I hate emojis and emoticons

    Smiley faces are not for grown-ups Back in the early days of the Internetwork, the nerdy IT people would send emails to me with little symbols like this : – ) to show that they were being funny, ironic, cool. Gosh I hated it. When someone sent me an email with a smiley face my […]

  • ABC website uses "gotten"

    Should you be using gotten?

    Over the last few years Australians have become more tolerant of the use of gotten. Gotten as the past participle of get, instead of got, is a direct borrow from American English. I am not so sure why after decades of exposure to Hollywood films and American sitcoms we have finally succumbed to gotten (October […]