A Word Nerd's Idea of a Fun Rainy Afternoon
Woe is I. She is going with Margaret and I. Which one is grammatically correct? The first one might sound wrong to the ear but is actually correct. The second one might sound right, but isn’t. Did you have to stop and think about this? You’re not alone. In her national bestseller, “Woe is I,” author Patricia T. O’Connor spends 250ish easy-to-read pages tackling these and many other ticklish grammatical issues. I recently spent a rainy Saturday browsing through my collection of books about writing looking for something to re-read. This one was just too good to pass up. Using humor, puns and clever “turns of words,” O’Connor makes even the most dedicated grammarphobe discover topics like commas and capitalization, plurals and participles can be interesting and, yes - even fun - to read about. The best line in the book’s introduction says “Most of us don’t know a gerund from a gerbil and don’t care, but we’d like to speak and write as though we did.” Without technical jargon or...