Grammar Stammer Blog - Grammar Stammer

Historical vs. Historic

2/6/2025

Words matter – especially when talking about the past. People often mix up historic and historical, but they’re not quite the same.

🔹 Historical refers to anything related to history. A historical document? Just an old record. A historical event? Something that happened in the past—important or not.

🔹 Historic, on the other hand, means something truly significant. A historic event changes the course of history. Think groundbreaking moments, not just things that happened.

For example, an election is historical because all elections belong to history. But an election that threatens democracy itself? That’s historic – just not in a good way.

Schrodinger’s cat: a historical thought experiment that had historic impacts on quantum mechanics and our understanding of superposition.

Recrudescence - a word worth knowing

1/3/2025

Language is filled with fascinating words that capture nuanced experiences, and "recrudescence" is one of them. Though it may not appear in everyday conversation, it conveys a concept that's surprisingly relatable.

At its core, recrudescence refers to the revival or reappearance of something undesirable, often after a period of dormancy. Its roots lie in the Latin word recrudescere, meaning "to become raw again,". In other words, it’s a return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.

Recognizing recrudescence can be empowering. When we anticipate the possibility of setbacks, we can prepare to confront them with resilience. Whether it's revisiting unresolved conflicts or dealing with the resurgence of an old challenge, understanding this concept encourages us to face it with clarity and grace.

So next time you’re describing something unpleasant making a comeback, consider using recrudescence. It’s a beautifully specific word for life’s inevitable moments of renewal—even when those moments aren’t what we hoped for.

Disorganized vs. Unorganized

12/23/2024

Both words are adjectives, but there is a subtle difference in how they describe messiness.

Disorganized is used to describe something that used to be orderly, but not anymore.
Example: My office space tends to get a little disorganized throughout the day, but I always remember to clean everything up by the end of my shift.

Unorganized is used to describe something that has never been orderly in the first place.
Example: The event felt completely unorganized because there was no clear schedule or direction for participants.

Christmas with cats always ends up being a little disorganized

Equality Vs. Equity

11/1/2024

Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources of opportunities. It assumes that everyone has the same starting point and needs.

Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities need to reach an equal outcome. This means that some people or groups might require additional resources or support. Equity addresses imbalance. Nothing is taken away from those who can already achieve their goals. Others just require a little bit more.

Source:
Equity: how we strive for equal opportunities

Past vs. Passed

10/25/2024

Past can be used as a noun, an adjective, a preposition, and an adverb.
Example as a noun:
- Star Wars takes place a long, long, time ago, in the distant past.
Example as an adjective:
- I miss working with some people and sometimes think of past times.
Example as a preposition:
- The library is just past the memorial park.
Example as an adverb:
- I saw the father running past our house, chasing after his young child.

Passed is the past tense of the verb pass.
Example: I thought I had failed, but I received the result today and I passed the test!

Prepositions

9/5/2024

A preposition is a word or a group of words that is used with a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase that shows direction, location, time, or that introduces an object.

Examples
Direction: I’m going to the grocery store.

Location: My cat is resting in a box.

Time: I must leave by 1pm to make my doctor appointment.

Introducing an object: My husband brought home a box of pizza.

Prepositions are usually followed by an object, but there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill once said in jest of this old and abandoned rule, “From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” 😎

Initialisms

8/14/2024

In a previous post, I wrote about the differences between abbreviations: acronyms, and initialisms. I’d like to explore initialisms a little bit and they have become more prevalent over the years. An initialism is a type of acronym that is pronounced as individual letters. Here are some examples:

There are many more. Share them in the comments!

Gruntled vs. Disgruntled

7/18/2024

I was unaware of the fact that “gruntled” was a word and is the opposite of “disgruntled”.

The first known use of adjective gruntled was about 100 years ago. It was a writer who decided to playfully remove the dis- from disgruntled and create its antonym to mean “to make happy”, In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is listed as a word to use informally, so perhaps avoid using it in professional settings.
Example:
I was gruntled to see a small kitten on my doorstep. I had to take her in and adopt her.

Disgruntled is a word that goes as far back as the 1600s, so this word came first. A word that is in common use, it’s an adjective that means angry or dissatisfied.
Example:
I was disgruntled to learn that decisions were being made with consulting me.

Let's rally the troops and bring back gruntled into common use!

Immigrate vs. Emigrate vs. Migrate

6/26/2024

Here’s a summary of the meaning of these words, and tricks to remember the difference.

“Immigrate” is a verb and refers to permanently moving to a new country.
Example: My grandparents immigrated to Canada during the second world war.

“Emigrate” is a verb and refers to permanently leaving one’s country to a new country.
Example: My grandparents emigrated from Ukraine during the second world war.

“Migrate” is a verb and focuses on the actual process of moving from one place to another. Migrate can also refer to the movement of animals from one place to another, and the intention does not have to be permanent.
Example:
Just before winter arrives, birds migrate from Canada to warmer climates further south. They migrate back to Canada as the weather warms up.

I now present you with ways to remember the differences:

Immigrate starts with an “I”. Think of IN, and it becomes easy to remember that immigrate means moving INTO a new country.
Emigrate starts with an “E”. Think of EXIT, and it becomes easy to remember that emigrate means EXITING a country to move to another.
Migrate starts with an “M”. Think of MOVE, and it becomes easy to remember that migrate means MOVING from one place to another.

Draw the Curtains

5/26/2024

This is a fun idiom because its meaning really depends on the starting point.

Drawing the curtains can mean closing them, especially at night or for privacy.
Example: As night falls and the lights are turned on in the house, I like to draw the curtains so that I don’t feel like I’m being watched by outsiders.

Drawing the curtains can also be done by pulling the curtains to let more in more light or to discover what is behind them.
Example: In the movie, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s little dog Toto reveals who the Wizard really is by drawing the curtain.

Sneaked or Snuck?

4/28/2024

Two hundred years ago, Jennifer Garner would have been right.

Sneak can be used as a noun, an adjective, or a verb. As a verb, and prior to the 1800s, “sneaked” was indeed the only version of the past tense/participle for “sneak”, following the pattern of regular verbs.

However, since then "snuck" has become common use. This is a rare case of the adoption of an irregular pattern for a verb that already had an established regular past tense, but its use has become so frequent that snuck is now considered standard.

Ms. Garner is forgiven for her mistake, though. After all, she went to Denison University, not Harvard.

Mnemonics

3/15/2024

We likely have all used a mnemonic technique at least one in our life. In short, a mnemonic (the first ‘m’ is silent) is a technique to memorize and retain information. There are tons of examples. I will share a few I have used:

A way to remember the Great Lakes? HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Eric, Superior
The order of operations in math? PEDMAS or BEDMAS: Parentheses/Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction
The order of the planets from the Sun? My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas (but I guess it’ll have to be changed to My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos!): Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (Pluto)
Trying to remember the order of colours in a rainbow? ROYGBIV: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet
Trying to remember which months have 31 days? Use your knuckles!

Do you have any other cool mnemonics to share?

Homophones

2/19/2024

Homophones are words that sound the same but are often spelled differently. Examples include:

Know of any others? Please share in the comments.

Elusive vs. Illusive vs. Allusive

1/18/2024

Funny thing about words – you’ll find some of them SOUND the same, but actually have different spellings and meanings. These are called Homophones. Because homophones can sometimes cause some confusion, I thought it best to address one set here. Check out my post on Homophones for more.

Elusive is an adjective that means “difficult to find or capture.”
Example: Somehow the mice keep eluding the traps I’ve set in the basement. They are being elusive.

Illusive is an adjective that describes something as misleading or deceptive.
Example: If you see a unicorn in your backyard, you might want to double check if you’ve been drugged. You can describe that vision as illusive.

Allusive is an adjective that describes when someone is making implied or indirect references.
Example: When speaking to others about how my little cat Alfie passed away, I allude to her poor health. I am being allusive.

Let’s look at the photo. Here we have a cute little furball that is hiding from a giant monster.

I alluded to a cat by saying “cute little furball”.
The cat is hiding. She is being elusive.
There is no giant monster this cat is hiding from. I was being illusive.

The Oldest Words in the English Language

12/29/2023

In deciding what I could write about this month, I came across an interesting.

Now what I’m about to say sounds like something from the book, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but this is not fiction. The IBM supercomputer at the University of Reading, known as ThamesBlue, has been around for more than a decade now. Before it arrived, it took an average of six weeks to perform a computational task such as comparing two sets of words in different languages, now these same tasks can be executed in a few hours.

And what did scientists discover?

They discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.

The Indo-European languages are most of those originally found across Europe, the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent. Examples include Celtic, Roman, Greek, Germanic, Nordic (with the exception of Finnish), Slavic, Armenian, Iranian, Afghan, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Napali and Kashmiri, modern-day derivations such as English and Spanish.

Researchers call words that persist relatively untouched across the ages 'cognates’. The most resilient cognates, the numerals, have not changed significantly in their entire history.

Pretty cool stuff, eh?

Source:
Scientists discover oldest words in the English language and predict which ones are likely to disappear in the future (reading.ac.uk