For years, readers and writers have debated a common informal use of the word “literally.”

In conversation, some people use the word to provide exaggerated emphasis for a statement: “I love Haruki Murakami so much I literally read South of the Border, West of the Sun one hundred times.” Back in 2011, we even published a grammar PSA about the word.

Reddit reader andtheniansaid shared three separate dictionary definitions that include this informal usage, arguing that “it is okay to use the word ‘literally’ for emphasis.”

Read more

For our first Grammar Public Service Announcement of the new year, we have some deceptively simple advice: Stop writing the phrase “have went.”

Never write a sentence like this: “I have went to my local independent bookstore.” Instead, always use this construction: “I have gone to my local independent bookstore.”

English Plus has a great post on the technical reasons: “Gone is the past participle of to go. Used as the verb of a sentence, it must always be preceded by an auxiliary verb such as has, have, had, is, am, are, was, were, be, or one of their contractions. Went is the past tense of to go. It never takes an auxiliary verb.”

Read more

The activist grammarians at Lake Superior State University have released their 2012 List of Banished Words, a collection of overused, abused and fake words that infected our language this year.

The hardboiled English monitors singled out a host of words, including “amazing,” “baby bump,” “man cave” and “occupy.” What words would you like to banish from the English language next year?

In a clever twist, the press release utilized many of the banished terms: “Lake Superior State University released its 37th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness, an amazing list that is bound to generate some blowback. ‘Worn-out words and phrases are the new normal this year, but with some shared sacrifice, we can clean up the language and win the future,’ said an LSSU representative.” (Via Huffington Post)

We have another Grammar Public Service Announcement today: stop abusing the word “literally” in your writing.

Here’s more about the misuse of literally: “This is such a widely known misused word that examples are less common, as most people know to avoid the term – which should be used to describe something that is actually happening (for example, ‘He literally danced with joy.’) but should not be used for emphasis (‘Steam was literally coming out of his ears.’)”

Earlier this month, we warned writers against using the controversial word, “irregardless.” Our sibling blog eBookNewser shared today’s tip, linking to a list of the Top 10 Misused Words. What’s your favorite word that everybody abuses? (Literal dead end photograph via MorrowLess)

During the taping of BookTV’s  fall book preview this weekend, this GalleyCat editor unwittingly used the word “irregardless.” After the show aired, readers around the country responded with swift grammatical justice.

Despite the fact that some spell-checkers recognize the infamous word with more than one century of history, the Oxford English dictionary has a blunt entry: “Irregardless means the same as regardless, but the negative prefix ir- merely duplicates the suffix -less, and is unnecessary. The word dates back to the 19th century, but is regarded as incorrect in standard English.”

What do you think? You might be able to get away with using the word in everyday conversation, but don’t ever use the word in front of an audience of passionate readers. Once you have recovered from the grammatical shock, check out BookTV’s  fall book preview–it explores a massive slate of upcoming nonfiction books.

Blogger Thomas Steiner designed a Google Chrome extension to fix one of the most viewed and easily overlooked grammar mistakes on the Internet–Twitter’s “Who To Follow” feature.

When installed in your Google Chrome browser, Steiner’s free extension converts Twitter’s grammatically incorrect ‘Who to follow’ into ‘Whom to follow’ whenever you visit the social network site.

As most regular readers know, this GalleyCat editor constantly struggles to improve his grammar. It is somewhat reassuring to watch a major social network struggle with the same rules…

Read more

Today the literary folks at HTML Giant launched an informal grammar contest based on David Foster Wallace‘s work– publishing an actual worksheet from a nonfiction workshop taught by the obsessive author.

Here’s an excerpt from the post: “What follows is the complete text of a worksheet from his class … I’ll post the answers once it seems as if nobody is trying anymore. Don’t worry if someone else posts their answers first; they may not be right! Not as easy as it may first look. All sentences have one crucial error in punctuation, usage, or grammar.”

The contest part has ended–the answers are provided in the blog’s comments section–but it is still a fun exercise. In addition to writing the massive novel, Infinite Jest, Wallace also wrote an impressive, inspiring body of nonfiction essays. He died last year. (Via The Rumpus)