In English, a coup de grace is a strong finishing stroke or a decisive way of ending something. The loan phrase from French is used in all sorts of contexts. For instance, it’s often used in reference to competitive sports to describe a move or a score that effectively ends the match, and it’s often used in reference to works of art, describing a novel touch that gives the work a strong finish. [Read more...]
Veracity/veraciousness vs. voracity/voraciousness
Veracity means truthfulness or honesty. Its corresponding adjective is veracious, which is synonymous with true or truthful. Voracity is the noun corresponding to the adjective voracious, which means (1) eager to consume a great amount of food, or (2) marked by an insatiable appetite. [Read more...]
Woolen vs. woollen
For the adjective meaning made of wool, woolen is the preferred spelling in American English, though woollen appears about a tenth of the time. In varities of English from outside North America, woollen prevails by a large margin. Both spellings appear about equally often in Canadian news publications that publish online. [Read more...]
A priori
A priori is Latin for what is before. In English, we use it to describe ideas, arguments, and assumptions that are based on conjecture, prejudice, or abstract reasoning rather than real-world experience. For example, if you say tomorrow is going to be a boring day, this is an a priori statement because you have no experience with tomorrow. Or if you argue that all puppies smell nice, this is a priori because you have not smelled every puppy. [Read more...]
Buses vs. busses
In 21st-century English, buses is the preferred plural of the noun bus. Busses appears occasionally, and dictionaries list it as a secondary spelling, but it’s been out of favor for over a century. This is true in all main varieties of English. [Read more...]
Whinge
To whinge is to complain, especially in a fretful and persistent way. The word is roughly synonymous with whine, grouse, and gripe, and it often connotes annoyance with the complaining person or a sense that the complaining is unreasonable. [Read more...]
Wack vs. whack
The word meaning very bad or of dubious quality is wack, with no h. Your spell check might disapprove of wack, but the word has been in English a quarter of a century, and it has another sense—an eccentric or crazy person—that is even older, so spell check is wrong. [Read more...]
Plainclothes
Plainclothes is an adjective used to describe a police officer who wears civilian clothes to avoid being identified as law enforcement. Using a participial adjective—plainclothesed or plainclothed—might seem to make logical sense, but plainclothes has functioned adjectivally for at least a century and is not questioned by anyone conversant with law-enforcement lingo. It’s closely related to plainclothesman, an obsolescent term for a plainclothes officer. [Read more...]
Figurehead
A figurehead is a person with nominal leadership of an organization or government but no actual authority. For example, many modern monarchs are figureheads because their roles are merely ceremonial and most of their power was long ago ceded to democratic government. [Read more...]
Canceled vs. cancelled
In American English, the verb cancel is inflected canceled and canceling—with one l. In varieties of English from outside the U.S., including Canadian, British, and Australian English, cancelled and cancelling are the preferred spellings. [Read more...]
