The vaults

• Abolitionists not rebels
• A beautiful dead woman
• A quick word … poring over poor spelling
• A quick word … an outbreak of flaunting
• A quick word … seperate: smell a rat?
• A quick word … averse to adverse
• A quick word … side effect and after-effect
• A quick word … shoe-in??
• A quick word … all right or alright?
• A quick word … not a tiny spelling error
• A quick word … initialisms and acronyms
• A quick word … don’t reach out
• A quick word … but can you start sentences with ‘and’?
• A quick word … spring or Spring?
• A quick word … vocal chords or cords?
• A quick word … new series
• BBC: ‘Don’t call me BAME’: Why some people are rejecting the term
• Oxford Dictionaries finally bans sexist stereotypes
• Word order, wrong words, and old chestnuts
• Is there a word for . . . ?
• Revamps, vamps and vampires
• Anchors, beech trees and boks
• The sound of serendipity
• A confession and some lovely words
• Rabid sexism… Oxford Dictionaries says sorry
• Thanks for a bumper year!
• Here here, snow, and a wasted opportunity
• Kerching, ker-ching, ka-ching and, er… ur
• Pet peeves, a slight mistake, a palindrome and plus fours
• Marquess, marquis and marquee…
• This is just to say…
• The brain of a pea … hen
• Available now: Wordwatch for Kindle
• Introducing… Bennison Books
• People are too complicated…
• Men bishops only need apply
• Veni, vidi, venti — or something
• Is it a verb? Is it a noun? An introduction to the gerund
• Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos
• Eclogues and shivering sizars
• When correct grammar doesn’t help
• Set in stone? Misquoting Martin Luther King Jr
• As annoying as someone with a clinically diagnosed condition
• Deceptively drinkable
• Necessarily avoidable headlines
• Larger than something very large indeed
• Vegas the dog
• Cultivating confusion
• Dead cool, not cool, and he said what??
• Science fiction, robots, worse than worse, and a telegram
• In the line of fire: advertising copy
• Just in time, a word shows up instead
• The past might be the future (and sophistry)
• Empty words, headless MPs and flowers
• Royal wedding bombshell
• Some things are worth repeating (and others aren’t)
• A euphemism on the racecourse
• There is an evil hand afoot ahead
• A preference for orientation
• In praise of flackery
• Sweeping away class barriers?
• None more use than a grammar book
• Old wives’ tales – good or bad?
• A grisly error
• Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt
• You’re telling me stories
• Eyes like strange sins
• A few notes about crescendo
• Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
• A female man
• AstroTurf v. grass roots
• An error of judgement and an error
• Fleas, compasses, love and seduction
• Chickens and Latin
• Humpty Dumpty packs his portmanteau
• Sexism and eggs
• Lick into shape
• I spy a wrongly used word
• Millenium mistake
• Mother Nature
• Indignance, the passive and euphemism
• Just because
• Meteoric rise of the falling star
• Splitting hairs?
• Altogether different
• Pens (poisoned), knives, shadows and footprints
• Love set you going
• Attack of the giant killer jellyfish
• Worse than being electrocuted?
• Pouring over Einstein’s brain
• Straight talking (and cat-filled lowlifes)
• King Arthur, coda confusion, the butler and TV
• Bought or brought?
• Hot air
• Tense discussion
• Tablescape
• Double take
• ‘Famous’ is always a lie
• Maintaining standards
• It’s sort of zoom, zip, hiccup, drip
• Preherstory
• Sparkling prose
• Gobbledegook alert
• Housewife’s choice
• A warning about warnings
• The power of three
• Comma sense
• A set-to over set to
• Redundant female
• Nothing much
• New for old
• Try to or try and?
• Crisp copy?
• Eyes like a hawk
• I am irresistible…
• The female his
• Wordrobe
• Diachronic
• Summer solstice
• Epicentre
• Congressmen?
• Squids, squibs and misquotes
• Mentally retarded children?
• Off-key pronouncements
• YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 ME
• Mutton dressed as lamb
• The Queen’s English?
• Protesting too much?
• Misogynists and misterogynists?
• Gallimaufry
• Anoraxia
• Prevaricate and procrastinate
• Looking everyone of her 45 years…
• Flounder or founder?
• Deceptively deceptive
• Something fishy: baited breath
• Hysterical, queenly and psychotic
• Girl and man
• The abominable spokesperson
• Mitigate and militate
• The natural order?
• Double negatives
• Fancy a glass of Sweat?
• Like every harlot in history…
• Stop press: siphon
• Reign or rein?
• Excellent redefined
• Blaggards, blaggers and blackguards
• Fudge majeure
• The female of the species
• Simplexity
• Excitable and bubbly
• A schizophrenic attitude?
• Mirdling the English language?
• Prescribe, subscribe and proscribe
• Accents and dialects
• Accommodation
• Lay and lie
• Past or passed?
• Trilemma?
• Different from, to, or than?
• Practical or practicable?
• While or whilst?
• Practice or practise?
• Non-defining and defining clauses
• Instal and install
• Technical stuff — part 12: intransitive and transitive verbs
• Donds
• Active and passive sentences
• April Fool’s Day
• Technical stuff – part 12: prepositions
• Fully qualifyed hairdresser…
• Who’s or whose?
• A hotel or an hotel?
• It’s no yoke…
• What is a sentence?
• Lightning or lightening?
• License or licence?
• Cui bono?
• Spelling tips – possession
• Loathe and loath
• Hyphens – part 7: ‘un’ words
• Off of or off?
• Hyphens – part 6: compound adjectives
• Data, media, strata — singular or plural?
• Spelling tips – inoculate
• Table or table?
• Moot point or mute point?
• Hyphens – part 5: compound nouns
• Hung or hanged?
• Stationary or stationery?
• Hyphens- part 4: separating identical letters
• Your or you’re?
• Spelling tips – innocuous
• Hyphens – part 3: compass points
• Technical stuff – part 11: adjectives (ungradable)
• Travel mug
• Hyphens – part 2: numbers
• Heated conversation
• Technical stuff – part 13: pronouns
• Please do hesitate…
• Technical stuff – part 12: idioms
• Wheelchair-bound?
• Hyphens – part 1: avoiding confusion
• Vigour, vigor and vigorous
• Olderpreneurs
• Quotation marks #4
• Their’s???
• Quotation marks #3
• Spelling tips – occasion
• Quotation marks #2
• Spelling tips – grammar
• Quotation marks #1
• Forgoing or foregoing?
• Technical stuff – part 10: interjections
• ‘My friends and I’ or ‘me and my friends’?
• Clothes cupboard
• Spelling tips – desert and dessert
• Humour, humor, and humorous
• The colon#3
• The colon#2
• Ambient sausage rolls
• The colon#1
• Spelling tips – interrupt
• Pour or pore?
• You will of??
• Technical stuff – part 10: conjunctions
• Messting
• Technical stuff – part 9: adverbs
• Spelling tips – doubt
• Fewer or less?
• Discretionary mail
• Until or up until?
• Swappage
• That or which?
• Spelling tips – committee
• Technical stuff – part 8: adjectives (regular and irregular)
• Spelling tips – address
• Casual use of the term ‘bipolar’
• Technical stuff – part 7: adjectives
• Marketing man – or woman?
• Everyone and every one
• Describing physical and mental conditions
• Wheelchair-bound?
• Technical stuff – part 6: verbs (the infinitive)
• Blind people
• Begging the question
• Technical stuff – part 5: verbs
• Travellers and Gypsies
• Technical stuff – part 4: collective nouns
• Biannual and biennial (and bimonthly)
• ‘a’ or ‘an’ before initialisms?
• He or she – or they?
• Technical stuff – part 3: proper nouns
• Take affect or take effect?
• She’s so intolerant, but he doesn’t suffer fools gladly
• Spelling tips – necessary
• Technical stuff – part 2: abstract nouns
• She’s such a tomboy
• Technical stuff – part 1: nouns
• Disinterested and uninterested
• Deaf and not so dumb
• Spelling tips – embarrass
• Ladies first?
• Gratuitous modifiers – or the lady bus driver
• Jack of all trades
• Commas – fused sentences
• Sorting the ladies from the women
• Sorting the women from the girls
• Fulsome – what does it actually mean?
• Spelling tips – rhythm
• Underestimate or overestimate?
• Feisty pensioner fends off ageism
• When is a man not a man?
• Discreet and discrete
• Comprise
• Three-fifths – singular or plural?
• Helicopter parents
• Dependant and dependent
• Last or past?
• The comma – part 4
• Mangling the language at Manchester Airport
• Compliment or complement?
• The comma – part 3
• Compare to or compare with?
• The comma – part 2
• Allude or elude?
• Alumna and alumnus
• The comma – part 1
• Alternate or alternative?
• Top scientist or top female scientist?
• Robbie’s? Or more than one Robbie?
• Foxy Knoxy or the female criminal
• Breath or breathe?
• Alleviate or ameliorate
• Obama’s countrymen
• Amend or emend?
• Trilling and shrieking
• The semicolon and certain words
• The workhorse semicolon – lists
• Affect or effect?
• i before e?
• The apostrophe and decades
• And God saw that it was good
• An epileptic or a person with epilepsy?
• The possessive apostrophe. Part 4 – initialisms
• Do we need to know that?
• The beautiful semicolon
• Intelligenti pauca
• Everyday or every day?
• The possessive apostrophe. Part 3 – children’s, women’s, men’s
• The end is nigh(t)?
• To correct or not to correct?
• Toys for boys
• From here to obscurity
• The possessive apostrophe. Part 2 – Charles’ crown or Charles’s crown?
• Its, it’s or … its’??
• Girls or women?
• Singular or plural?
• Incent? INCENT??
• It’s – not its
• Ladies first? Not often
• Rogue apostrophe at the BBC
• Another he that could be a she
• The Children’s apostrophe
• The possessive apostrophe. Part 1 – the basics
• More chocolate, less grammar
• A civilian female police officer?
• Autistic as a term of abuse?
• A taxi driver’s strange hobby?
• Apostrophes and initialisms
• Prepositions (and the ends of sentences)
• Possessive apostrophe alert
• Program or programme?
• Trade-in or trade in?
• Parties and monkeys
• Boldly going – or the split infinitive
• Its or it’s?
• Were or was? (The subjunctive)
• Am I allowed to say that? A no-nonsense guide to political correctness