This post title appears very interesting when it's got an ellipsis in it...

A friend of MC Hammer's, Pa' Trula, recently complained that a man, a love interest for that matter, had not replied to an email she had written him. Yes, maybe it was just an innocent mistake on his part, but there was an aspect of this particular lack of replying that was very unsettling to MC Grammar.


The fact is that Pa' Trula explained that she had signed off her email with an ellipsis. And this means that a very, very serious grammar misunderstanding had occurred.

But firstly, what does an ellipsis do? Well, it has multiple uses. An Ellipsis is a three dots, one after another, like this,

...

The Ellipsis is always three dots, no more. Try to resist doing a long line of dots. The Ellipsis indicates omitted words in a sentence, like this,

The disgraced football stars described the woman who made the allegations as a 'total... dishonest person'.

It can indicate a pause in speech, such as


My thoughts wander all the time...I can't seem to concentrate. I feel...strange.

Or an unfinished thought


On the other hand, I did thoroughly enjoy some of U2's early hits...


The ellipsis can be simply to omit unnecessary or inappropriate material, such as in a news article. Or it might be used to imply something more, so that the reader fills in the gaps. For example,

Usually I wouldn't have done it but it was such a nice night and I had plenty of wet wipes...

So we can see that the ellipsis indicates more information that, for various reasons, has been omitted. It's grammatical code for 'we had sex' or 'gratuitous abusive slander once lived here' or just 'Eh? Eh?' If the Ellipsis was an expression, it would be this one.



It's highly suggestive of information that is not there.

Even the Mona Lisa has a distinct ellipses-ness about her. See?



We get the feeling that information is missing. Just like an ellipsis.


But brothers, sisters, the ellipsis doesn't stop there, and this leads us to why Pa' Trula was so upset in the first place. An arguably more modern use of the ellipsis is to invite response. When Pa' Trula finished her email with this sentence

I'll leave it up to you to suggest something to do on the weekend...

She was extending this unfinished suggestion to her gentleman friend. And he seems to have misunderstood that the sentence was for him to complete, like a lost grammatical puppy, begging to be taken back to it's appropriate grammar home, where a hot meal is waiting for it. Because, in addition to the images we have already seen, the ellipsis is also this expression,




Waiting, listening, expecting. In person, if Pa' Trula's love-interest had not responded to her statement, it would have looked like he had a sight deficiency, so outrageous and obvious would have have been that he couldn't interpret the expression on her face. And yet in an email, he has not understood the true meaning of the ellipsis, and yet another potentially beautiful thing has been ruined by a poor understanding of grammar. Don't let it happen to you!

The semi-colon: what has it done for you lately?

This is a semi-colon



MC Grammar thinks that in our time, no piece of punctuation is more divisive. You might notice that I have just made an excellent pun.

Because of confusion about what this humble sign does exactly, people tend to avoid it, instead of risk using it and looking like a fool.

So what is a semi colon, and what does it do? Put simply, a semi-colon is a pause or break in a sentence. Its first use was to separate words or statements of opposed meaning in the same sentence.

For example:

They say hot dogs contain traces of arsenic; I say they contain traces of delicious.

Here, the statements are closely related but oppose each other, and the fact that they oppose each other wouldn't be as obvious if you used a full stop instead of a semi-colon.

A semi-colon is also used when you are listing items in a sentence.

For example:

He looked in the bag and made a mental note of everything that was inside; pears; plums; oranges; glasses.

As recently as fifty years ago, semi-colons were everywhere. Authors used them more than a little liberally, such as Virginia Woolf, who wrote 'To The Lighthouse.' She wrote sentences like this:

'She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness.'

You can see how Woolf is showing how the character's thoughts about the man are complex, but they still belong together, and we see this with the help of the semi-colon.

The semi-colon also imitates the way we speak. A comma shows where a person has stopped for breath, and a semi-colon does the same, with the addition of showing us where a change of mood is. When we read a book where someone is speaking and they do this,

It has come to the point where I can't go on with this charade anymore; but I will play along anyway.

We can see where the character has re-adjusted his or her thinking and mind-set. A comma can show where there has been a break, but it doesn't get across as effectively where the mind has repositioned itself.

In a way, the semi colon is like a thrust. It pulls back, pauses and then pushes forward again. It hesitates with a notion and then continues with it, realigning itself with a new, but linked idea. It does something no other form of punctuation can do, even the colon, which is like its slightly simple second cousin who shops at Chrisco , which I will talk about later. Colons I mean, not Chrisco. We won't talk about Chrisco here.

A lot of people find the semi-colon intimidating. Even with the above information, it can be hard to know when to use it. And a lot of people think that the semi-colon's days are numbered, and that soon it will be an outdated form of punctuation. American journalist James Kilpatrick even called it 'girly', just to throw in some random sexism as his contribution to the debate.

It's true that the semi-colon makes a sentence a little bit complicated. That's because it contains two thoughts, not one, and it makes the sentence longer, and on the whole, people don't like that. They want their sentences like they want their food. Quick and simple. No fiddly bits, nothing that they'll need to get a fork out for. But it can't always be pre-cooked mini-pies, sometimes it has to be cheese fondue and fiddly long cheese-prongs, and hot tea afterwards, so all the cheese doesn't harden in your stomach and kill you. And just like fondue, there's nothing quite like the semi-colon. So pull out your cheese prongs of punctuation and set up your mini gas-heater of expression, and let the punctuation do its job.

Please form an orderly queue for your good-grammar vaccination

MC Grammar recently received a series of vaccinations, and now feels ready to take on the world. Rabies, Hepatitis A and B can't hurt me, neither can Malaria, Diphtheria, Typhoid or Yellow Fever. It's a good feeling. Sorry all you anti-immunisation lobbyists, I'm immunised up to my eyeballs and I love it.

Some fun times were had over the last few weeks, as I regularly rocked up to my local surgery and chatted cheerfully away to my nurse, as she cleverly lulled my muscles into relaxed state, before jabbing a total of 9 needles into me. But an interesting point was raised during the many afternoons I spent there: are you immune to, or immune from, a disease?

Before we go further, this might be a good moment to brush up on our understanding of prepositions. A preposition is a 'linking' word, such as to, from, over, or during. What they link is nouns, phrases or pronouns to the sentence. They're like the MC that introduce the main act. For example,

The book is beside the table.

That said, what's the story with being immune to, or immune from? Well brothers and sisters, it's a complicated story, because it depends what you're talking about. If you are talking about being protected from an 'undesirable circumstance' such as getting criminally prosecuted, or heavily taxed, then you are immune from. For example, you can be 'immune from arrest', or 'immune from criticism.'

However, when you're talking about something you're not susceptible or responsive to, you use immune to. For example 'I am immune to Polio.'

This is a tricky mother. The Oxford English Dictionary gives lots of examples of 'immune to' and 'immune from' that don't follow the pattern above. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary uses the 'immune to' phrasing to include anything a person might be resistant to, for example, 'he was immune to all pleas.' It's one of those things that if you think about it too hard, you can fry your brain and alienate yourself from your loved ones.

MC Grammar thinks that if you just surf the preposition wave, this one sort of sorts itself out. When you think about it, it makes sense that you're immune 'from' something that you're trying to get away from, or would rather not happen, and you're immune 'to' something that you have personally arranged will never happen. Take MC Grammar and Rabies, for example, I will never meet my end by frothing at the mouth – I've seen to that.

MC Grammar gives props to those who deserve it

MC Grammar has learnt that Cleo Magazine in Australia has been giving some funky props to this blog on Twitter, helping MC Grammar bring grammar into the lives of even more brothers and sisters. Check it.

http://twitter.com/cleomag/status/1800188993

What can I say but ‘thanks!’ to Cleo for reading, and for spreading the word. Below are some of the many ways I would say thanks to Cleo if I only could say it in person

U Can’t Split This: the old-school rule of not splitting your infinitives.

MC Grammar is from the school of thought that the purpose of grammar and punctuation is to communicate better with each other. It should make it easier to communicate with more people – not less. So when something can be understood without being technically grammatically correct, then I think it should become acceptable.

A good example of this is ‘Split Infinitives.’

An infinitive is the ‘stem’ of a verb. In other words, it is the universal form of the verb, when it hasn’t been changed. For example, ‘To have’, ‘to change’ ‘to eat’, etc. Verbs stop being infinitive when they are changed to fit with different tenses or to agree with plurals, for example, if 'to have' is the infinitive,‘We have lunch with Sam’ could become ‘We had lunch with Sam’ or ‘She has lunch with Sam.’ and so on.

About thirty years ago, school kids were being taught that an infinitive form of a verb could not be separated from its little ‘to’ companion. For example, saying ‘I need to quickly speak with you’ was regarded as bad grammar. The reason? In Latin, as in some other Latin-based languages today, an infinitive could never be split, not least because the ‘to’ part was built into it, in the same way as the French infinitive for ‘to speak’ is ‘Parler’, hence it couldn’t be split, obviously, unless you were some crazy person who thought it was cool to wedge a whole extra word into the centre of another.

So the key reason that you weren’t meant to split an infinitive was because some other language, one that people tended to look up to as being more distinguished, couldn’t split its own infinitives. This is why people in old novels tend to say things like ‘I need quickly to speak with you.’ Or ‘Finally I go to attend to mama today.’

Sticking to the rule of infinitives is all very well if you happen to go back in time, find yourself in Ancient Rome, can’t speak of word of Latin but feel reassured that whatever they’re saying, they’re not splitting their infinitives, but what relevance does it have for speakers of modern English? A sentence continues to make sense even where an infinitive has been split, and so as far as MC Grammar is concerned, pack this rule away next to your mini-disc player and your floppy discs.

More correct than you: How hypercorrections impress no-one.

I once heard a great quote that went ‘a high brow is just someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence.’ There’s a lot of truth in there. The great institution of grammar tends to be a haven for people who know a lot about language, but not much about anything else, such as not being jerks.

This is where the scourge of ‘hypercorrections’ hits us. A hypercorrection is where a non-standard grammatical rule is applied in the belief that it is correct, even though a more familiar, standard rule would work just fine. Put simply, it’s masturbation with words.

One of the most common hypercorrections is the Me and I rule. Most people are taught at school that you don’t say ‘Me and you should eat our lunches now’, you say, you and I should eat our lunches now. That’s fine, but I don’t know about you, but as a kid at school, MC Grammar had it drummed into his head that using the word me was as bad as stripping naked and doing a poo on the Queen of Sweden, due to the idea that it could be uncouthly misused where the more refined I should have been.

As a result, a lot of people tend to think that using I is more proper than using me. This is where you get sentences like 'He gave it to you and I'. This is incorrect. The rule is that the pronoun (You, we, she, he, them) that would stand in isolation is the one that you should use. For example, you would say I went to the movies, therefore you would say You and I went to the movies. However, you would say he gave it to me, not he gave it to I, therefore you would say he gave it to you and me, not he gave it to you and I.

The best way to remember this rule is to simply remind yourself that the pronoun that would stand in isolation is the one to use. For example, when you hear someone say The letter was for you and I, you know that they should have said The letter was for you and me, because you can't say The letter was for I (Unless you are a seventeenth-century fictional pirate, obviously)

This cool video which talks about the correct pronounciation of often, might be just what you need to help you along as you let your thoughts about hypercorrection sink in. Enjoy!

Feeling Sarcastic? Try some capital letters!

So, MC Grammar has become an exam invigilator. This means that I let kids into exams, then I give them their exam papers and I tell them all the important rules about the exam. Then if anything goes wrong, like a paper with a messed-up question, or a freak-out by one of the kids, MC Grammar is right on top of it, sorting it out, talking them off the roof, returning them to their table, and making a note of all incidents in the special invigilator file.

But just the other day, I noticed something alarming. I was reading my special invigilator handbook, accurately titled General, Vocational and Diploma Qualifications – Instructions for conducting examinations. It struck me as a bit strange that since this was the title of the handbook, they hadn’t followed the general rule of capitalising all the key words, and left ‘conducting’ and ‘examinations’ alone to fend for themselves against a whole crowd of fearsome capitalisations.

But it got worse. Down the bottom of the page read ‘At least one copy of these Instructions must be available in each examination room.’

Why did ‘Instructions’ get a capital letter? Yes, it’s a noun, i.e it is the name of something, and technically the names of things get capitalised, but ‘copy’, ‘examination’ and ‘room’ are all nouns too, aren't they? Where was their glory? Where was their time to shine?

There are some basic rules for capitalising words. Let’s power through the basic ones first, then jump into the big daddies afterwards.

A word needs to start with a capital letter when it is:

1. A day of the week. Take note that the seasons are not capitalised.

It was Wednesday by the time I realised that it was autumn.

2. The name of a language.

Apparently Hungarian is really hard to learn.

Complication alert! The names of subjects in school are not capitalised, unless they happen to be languages.

Today I have geography, maths and Spanish.


3. The first word of a sentence, or comes after an exclamation or question mark.

Have we seen the last of Janet Jackson’s left nipple? Probably not.

The names of festivals, holidays and holy days

Such as Christmas, Ramadan, the feast of Purim and Halloween.

4. Distinctive historical periods

London was a prosperous city during the Middle Ages.

Britain was the first country to experience the Industrial Revolution.The Greeks were in Greece during the Bronze Age

4. The first word of a direct quotation

In my frustration I cried out ‘It has come to this and I blame myself!’ A passer-by wearing a Trent from Punchy shirt comforted me.

BUT there is no capital if the quotation is not a complete sentence.

The mayor described the stealing of his trousers as 'disappointing'

OK, so that’s all fairly straight forward. The next set of rules flirt a little more with the grey area between ‘nouns that get all the glory’ and ‘nouns that nobody loves’.

Words need to start with a capital for:

5. Proper names. A proper name means a name or title that refers to a person, a place, and institution or an individual event.


My name is Tom Baker

There was a fight between Professor Lacey and Doctor Davis

The Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco Bay

The Queen is addressing the House of Commons

I’m trying out for the Winter Olympics

This can get mighty confusing. For example:

I have met the President.

Dave is the president of a massive company.

In the first sentence, ‘President’ is capitalised because it refers to a specific person. In the second, ‘president’ is just the description of Dave’s job. Here’s another example.

Saint Servatius is the patron saint of rats.

‘Saint Servatius’ is the title and name of Saint Servatius, but ‘patron saint’ is not, and so gets no capital.

The title of a book, play, poem, film magazine, etc. Basically if it’s the title of a piece of art, media or entertainment, it gets capitalised. Note that words like 'the', ‘of’, ‘and’ or ‘in’ are not capitalised unless it’s the first word.

That movie 'Bully' is messed up.

Just because I haven’t read 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' doesn’t mean I can’t guess what happens in the end.

I enjoy the classical piece, 'Air on the G String'.

Aunt May keeps telling me how losing my virginity will be like giving away a Special Flower.

According to Ben, Fallout Boy are the Next Big Thing.

Can’t you just hear the sarcasm dripping off the page! If you ever want to own someone using the power of grammar, this is all you need to know.

So suddenly, I think I have the answer to why ‘Instructions’ is such a special word, while all the sad little words around it get ignored. ‘Instructions’, unlike ‘copy’, ‘examination’ and ‘room’, not only refers to a specific thing, unlike, say ‘room’, which could refer to any which room the instructions find themselves in, but it’s also the official, or ‘proper’ title of the thing which MC Grammar finds himself holding in his hand.

And so another grammar mystery has been solved!MC Grammar’s personal favourite use of capitalisations is to indicate sarcasm. You might have noticed that sarcasm is generally limited to spoken word, because it mostly gets expressed through tone of voice. For example, if I was to write that I really enjoy the films of Kevin Costner, you can’t be sure if I’m being sarcastic or if I’m an idiot without hearing the tone of my voice.

Many funky uses of the apostrophe

Like a lover you come to know expertly over time, we have now come to know the apostrophe intimately. We have seen it from many different angles and in many different lights. We’ve looked at the rule of Its and It’s, and the rule of indicating possessives, but there are still a few uses of the apostrophe that we haven’t explored.

But first, let’s get reacquainted with some old friends. In 2002, the Australian show Popstars manufactured a pop group called Scandal’us. Here they are, touching each other in a suggestive way. A year earlier, the UK version of the same show produced a band called Hear’Say.

Band names like this say a lot about how little we understand apostrophes. The apostrophe has a group of vital functions in grammar and language. If it was a person, it would be the head of a laboratory that was researching climate change, or an award- winning journalist who had been reporting on government corruption. It would be an important person, but a very serious one. It definitely would not be happy to be thrown into a dodgy pop group’s name by their manager as some sort of pretend rebellion against society.

MC Grammar believes that it’s no coincidence that both these bands had disrespect for the apostrophe, and that they both broke up within a year of winning the Popstars competition. Sadly, at least one of these people now sleeps with Kyle Sandilands, and MC Grammar thinks that in a way, that’s also karmic retribution for mistreating the apostrophe. Don’t let that happen to you. Follow the simple rules for using apostrophes.

1. It indicates time or quantity.

In one week’s time

Or, if the amount of time or quantity is plural:

Two weeks’ notice


Four metres’ worth of rope


2. It indicates the omission if figures in dates

It was the summer of ‘69

3. It indicates the omission of letters

I come from Jo’burg.


I hadn’t thought of that.

She should’ve thrown this out.


Where is the cat-o’-nine-tails?

Bear in mind that there are lots of words that are shortenings of other words, but have become so common in their own right that it’s not necessary to use an apostrophe to indicate the part that’s been left off. For example, phone is a shortening of telephone, and fridge is a shortening of refrigerator, but this is an example where the punctuation isn’t needed because the meaning doesn’t get lost without it.

4. It features in Irish names such as O’Reilly and O’Malley.

5. It indicates the plurals of letters,

Such as: How many t’s are there in attachment?


The apostrophe can also be sometimes be used to indicated non-standard English, like in ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ when the gamekeeper speaks vernacular English, while Lady Chatterley doesn’t. For example, he says,

If yer want ter be ‘ere, yo’ll non want me messin’ abaht a’ th’ time

But this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Just do what your heart tells you.

Holy shit! It’s singular and plural possessor apostrophes!

This is MC Grammar’s friend: J-Tube.

J-Tube is an English teacher.

J-Tube knows the difference between single and plural possessor apostrophes, but the kids in his English class do not. For example, one of them might look at a sentence like The wigs' problems and have no idea why the apostrophe is behind the s instead of in front of it. Each night, J-Tube flings himself on his bed and howls in frustration. He dreams about apostrophes that are crying out to be better understood and treated with dignity and respect, not just thrown in anywhere like so many mothballs on last year’s skinny jeans.

Last time we looked at It’s and Its. It was fun. We had some laughs. But it was only the innocent laughter of a group of fresh-faced school kids who don’t fully realise that they’re not just learning about the interesting early years of the ancient Roman Republic, they’re in for the whole fucking thing, all the way from the first expulsion of the ancient Etruscans to the final invasion of the Gauls that lead to the Dark Ages. And that is some serious timeline shit.

Anyway, now that we’ve dipped our toes in the apostrophe waters, it’s time to strip right off and plunge deeper into the grammar pool.

First up, let’s make ourselves a bowl of singular and plural possessor apostrophe cereal, eat it down and benefit from its high levels of riboflavin.

Let’s get there step by step.

Apostrophes indicate a possessive in a singular noun.

The boy’s hat.

When the possessor is a plural that does not end in an s (i.e Men, Children, Sheep) the apostrophe goes in front of the s.

The women’s movement

BUT

When the possessor does end in an end (i.e boys, wigs, tables), the apostrophe goes after the s

The babies’ bibs

So this is all fairly straight forward, but there is one final thing that you might have already noticed. What happens if you want to write something about, say, all the parents of all your friends? You can’t say ‘My friend’s parents’ because that just looks like you are referring to a single set of parents, so you have to say

My friends’ parents

An easy way to work this out is, ask yourself if something makes sense if the apostrophe is in front of the s. If you can see that it looks like you’re only referring to a singular thing, when you want to refer to many things, and you’re not lucky enough to have scored a plural word that DOESN'T end in s, then help yourself to an apostrophe AFTER the s.

This all might seem more information than you ever wanted to know – you might feel that you were happy in wading in your ignorance, and now that you’ve found out that you’ve been doing it wrong all along, you know that not only will you continue to do it wrong, but you’ll feel ashamed about it too.

Let me take this opportunity to remind you that MC Grammar loves you, and doesn’t want you to feel ashamed, just because you didn’t have a teacher like J-Tube around to fight for you and your grammar-hungry soul. And the truth of the matter is that we now have just six uses of the apostrophe left, and all of them are less used or less confusing than the ones we’ve already looked at. As far as I'm concerned, the score is almost settled against bad grammar. Justice has been served out here, and let me assure you, it tastes of your favourite ice-cream.

Knocking on the door of apostrophe-land: 'It's' and 'Its'

MC Grammar likes to keep up to date with technology. You might think that this means that naturally MC Grammar has a Facebook and Twitter account, which he can access directly from his iphone. You’d be close, but wrong. In fact. MC Grammar has decided to speed right on ahead to the next stage of keeping up-to-date and in contact with friends: by simply having a microchip inserted directly into his neck so that his every move can be followed by anyone who wants to keep tabs on him.

But the microchip has had an interesting side-effect: MC Grammar can now read minds. At first it just started as an intercepting the mass currents of status updates, but eventually refined itself so that I can hear just one, concise psychic thought at a time, and from any direction I want. It’s pretty wack.

With all that in mind, I know what you’re thinking right now. I can hear it loud and clear. You’re thinking ‘apostrophes don’t matter. People know what I’m saying anyway.’

As I said in the start of this blog, yeah, your friends on Facebook might know what you're saying, but what about everyone else? If you get lost in the apostrophe wilderness, it can mean instant humiliation among anyone you're trying to impress or persuade on paper. Strange as it may sound, that tiny little tadpole shaped sign does matter.

For example, imagine a newspaper's placard saying 'FAN'S RAGE AT STADIUM CONDITIONS'. This sounds pretty interesting until you realise they meant to say FANS', as in many fans, instead of just one fan who has completely gone mental.


The apostrophe has a lot of uses. The two main ones are:

1. To show that one or more letters have been missed out

Such as:

will not – won’t

do not – don’t

they are – they’re

it is – it’s

2. To show possession

Jane’s daffodils

Edward’s racial prejudice

Slough’s twin city in France

There will be more on apostrophes later on right now we need to deal with a law-breaker.

That’s right, there’s one word that breaks the mutherfucking rules for no obvious reason except to fuck you up, because it’s tough out there on the grammar streets. However bizarre this rule seems, there’s something to remember: there is a reason for this grammatical trickery.

The exception to the rules is the use of It’s and Its.

Use it’s only when you mean It is. For everything else, including when you are referring to something it owns, always use its.

As Lynne Truss says, ‘the rule is: the word it’s (with apostrophe) stands for it is or it has If the word does not stand for it is or it has then what you require is its.

So let’s just imagine you see a baby and you don’t know its gender and don’t care to find out. The way you would write about it is:

Its face reminded me of a wookie

Or, if you were a food critic and you were writing a review, you would say:

This was jellied eel at its best.

However, if you were just saying something ‘It is your turn’, you would just say:

It’s your turn.


The best way to remember this is by using the same system as if you were deciding on whether to use ‘your’ or ‘you’re’. If you’re saying It is, use it’s. If it’s anything else, use its.

Let’s turn to an aural aid. This week we need look no further than one of MC Hammer’s favourites, The Weather Girls, with their track, It’s Raining Men. This song wipes the floor with the newer Geri Halliwell version. Notice how the person who posted this video got it wrong and titled it 'Its Raining Men.' Remember, what they mean is It IS Raining Men, and that’s why it should read It's Raining Men. If it was anything else there would be no apostrophe. Freakishly easy, isn’t it?

Rainbow Grammar Family! Clearing up the confusion of UK versus US spellings.

This is how people say hello to each other in different parts of the world:

America: What’s up?

England: Alright?

France: What is it like you going? (Rough English translation)

Australia: How the fuck are you, you fucking cunt-arse dickhead? (Rough Lara Bing-in-a-tourism-ad translation)

We all know that people from difference places but have different ways of saying things. But things can get confusing at times. MC Grammar has a correspondent from the southern states of the US who can’t help but notice that there are words out there that swap back and forth like MC Grammar’s corn rows. She asked me, ‘what’s the deal with the word travelling? Sometimes it’s spelt traveling, and sometimes it’s spelt travelling? What’s the story with that?

Sister, the story is that traveling is the US spelling, and travelling is the UK and Australian spelling.

So now you’re saying ‘oh, I get it, in the US, words with a single l are spelt with a double ll in the UK.’ Not always. For example,

US Spelling UK     Australian Spelling


Enrollment                  Enrolment

Fulfill                           Fulfil

Skillful                        Skilful

There are lots of words like this, and people get confused all the time, which is fine – but sometimes they think that everyone but them is spelling incorrectly. Why you gotta hate? Don’t you know a rainbow needs all the colours to make it beautiful? That reminds me, Colour is the UK/Australian spelling, and Color is the US spelling. See what I’m saying here? Here’s a few more to remember.

US                              UK/Australia

Theater                              Theatre
Anemia                              Anaemia
Agism                                Ageism
Favorite                             Favourite
Check                               Cheque
Defense                             Defence
License                              Licence
Program                            Programme
Pajamas                             Pyjamas
Tire                                   Tyre


There’s also a difference between verbs that end in –ise. In the US, most of these words end in –ize instead. Words like agonise, terrorise, hypothesise, accessorise, and so on become agonize, terrorize, hypothesize, and accessorise.

I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘yeah, well it’s obvious what happened here; the yanks have gone and mangled our beautiful language and BROKEN THE RULES OF GRAMMAR. If the English do it one way, THAT must be the right way.

Sucker, you’d be wrong. The form –ize has been in use in English since the 16th century. The first white colonists of the US brought it over with them from England, and it they retained it while back in England it changed over time. This can be said for a lot of things in American English. For example, you might have noticed that they tend to say and write ‘I am’, ‘I will’ and ‘I can not’ a lot more than ‘I’m’, ‘I’ll’ and ‘I can’t’, which is more the norm in the UK and Australia. Again, this is because they’ve retained an older, or 16th Century usage of English. If grammar was a piece of clothing, they’d all be wearing Elizabethan ruffles, while the UK and Oz would probably be in Adidas track pants.

To finish up, here's a picture of some global harmony that should inspire you to take all these different spellings and use them for good, not evil. Use grammar to make friends, not enemies!

'To' and 'Too'

This is MC Grammar's sister, Mashaylah.

As you can see, Mashaylah is a pretty awesome. As you can see, Mashaylah has her priorities in order – she’s got lust for life, excellent coordination skills, and a bitchin wardrobe. If you saw Mashaylah on the street, you’d find yourself nodding your head and saying ‘scene’ before you even realised you were saying it, or what it meant.

But there's one thing Mashaylah doesn't have - an astute understanding of how to and too work.

Some people might judge Mashaylah for this, but not me. The truth is, more than just the impeccably dressed have this problem. It's a common situation, and it's time to clear it up.

Let's go to the Grammar dancefloor!

Here's the basic rundown:

Too – an excess amount, or meaning 'also.'

To – everything that isn't the above.

Example: There are too many examples to mention.

So too has two meanings. It means either also and besides, like I want one too, and it also means an excess amount of something, like too much or too many bananas.

To is a preposition, this just means it's a function word. It's like the person that everyone always dumps on at work, thinking they do shit-all around the place and imitating their laughter when they're not around, and then, when they finally leave you suddenly realise all the indoor-plants are dying and there's no recycled paper cut into neat squares for note-taking, because while they were being under-appreaciated by you and your workmates, they were the glue that held everything together, and you never even noticed.

A function word combines with a noun or a pronoun, and tells you where, or when, how or why. Some examples are

The job was suited to her abilities.

We went to the city.

Their faces were pressed to the windows.

They toasted to evil.

She referred to the dictionary.

In some cases it can also be used as an adverb. An adverb is a word that limits or 'describes' another word, like she paints well ('well' is the adverb), or he's funky fresh (funky is the adverb)

An example of to being used as an adverb is the patient came to, as in the patient woke up or regained conciousness.

MC Grammar thinks that the best way to remember anything is to remember it through song. Whenever you get confused, just remember The Temptations song 'Ain't Too Proud To Beg'. It's all there in the title, taking your hand and dancing you through a grammatically correct life.

Your and You're

For those of you who don't have time to read this whole post, here's the quick guide to your and you're:

You're – You are


Your – Something you own


Your and you're has to be the most divisive aspect of grammar around. Confusion about these two is so widespread that MC Grammar sometimes hurls himself onto his large, four-poster bed and cries from a sense of helplessness. But we can sit around all day and find people to blame for this grammatical mishap, or we can settle this score on the dancefloor. Come with me!


As I've said before, MC Grammar loves you, and doesn't want you to feel bad if you've just looked at the quick guide above, and your face is becoming paler as every grammar mistake you've ever made with your and you're is now dancing in front of your eyes like so many mischieveous leprechauns. There's no need to feel bad, just grab the horns of now and ride fearlessly into a grammatically correct future!


The best way to work out whether you're after your or you're in a sentence, is to ask yourself if you're saying you are, or if you are referring to something the other person owns. For example. 'Hey! You're right!' means 'you are right.' If you say 'your right', you're referring to their right-hand side.


Think of it like this - you cannot say any of these things:


Your great


Hope your ok


Your lying


Your welcome


Your looking trim



Because 'Your' is like 'Mine', 'hers', 'his' and 'theirs'. It's something that belongs to you.


But you can say:


What's your phone number?


Your mum!


Your car is missing


Your jumper is nice


Your cat just said 'Aubergine'


If you ever get completley confused, the best thing to do is, each time you're about to use your, ask yourself if you're saying you are in a shortened version. If you're not, hold back cowboy! Control yourself and your base animal urges! You'll be needing a you're there instead.

This video is also very entertaining and helpful. I think it's mostly directed at the thousands of abusive comments he gets for sharing his videos with the world, hence the slightly bitter undertone. MC Grammar has too much love to share this bitter undertone, but likes the cut of his jib anyway.

Why Even Bother?

I know this is what you're wondering. You're thinking, 'ho hum, another toff tries to find yet another way for me to feel shit about myself. Well you can you can go to hell in a hand-basket MC Grammar, because grammar's just what smarmy people use to put everyone else down! I hate you!'

It's true – correcting people over their grammar is the height of rudeness. No-one ever appreciates it, in fact a lot of people also consider it pointless. What does it really matter if an apostrophe is out of place, or if 'your' and 'you're' get mixed up. Who cares? You still get your point across, right?

It depends on who you're trying to get your point across to. Yeah, your mates on facebook are going to be down with your avant garde ways, but how hard does it become trying to write a cover letter for a job when you're not sure of where an apostrophe goes in 'its' or 'it's'? Most employers just throw away an application at the sight of one of those indescrepancies, so grammar can end up being the difference between getting ahead and staying where you are.

But that's all pretty superficial business. More importantly, the purpose of grammar is to help make a sentence clearer – otherwise it's just a way of showing off.

As Lynne Truss, who wrote 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' said, grammar and punctuation are the traffic signs of language. They prevent meaning from getting confused. For example: A used car show-yard sign reads, 'Used cars for sale: Why go elsewhere to be cheated? Come here first!' This looks wrong because of a mangled subject/verb agreement. More on that later. I promise it will be awesome. But more than that, the bottom line is that a lot of the time, you're not actually saying what you think you're saying, and that's like wearing a hessian sack and thinking you're in Prada.

Probably the number one example of this is the case of 'your'. I'm going to settle this score in the next post, but for now I'll say that when someone writes something like 'hope your well', the nearest thing they're actually asking is 'hope you have turned into a well.'

It's important to remember to MC Grammar loves you. MC Grammar has noticed your outrageous physical attractiveness, and also finds you funny and witty. MC Grammar doesn't mean to offend you or be a toff –and don't forget, MC Grammar makes grammar mistakes all the times. If this blog really annoys you, but helps you just a smidgen to write a letter or impress someone you're trying to sleep with, then my massive pants are filled with funky joy.