Definitely a post you should read

I feel shame. It's the kind of shame that you know you should have, and you attend years of cognitive therapy to see how irrational your shame is, but when you're lying in your four-poster bed in the dark, you can't help but feel like you're just a really a bad person.

You see, despite all my wonderful qualities, it is pretty often that I misspell the word definitely.

Yes, even me, who loves grammar so much that my children are named 'Suffix', 'Elipsis' and 'Dash' sometimes falters when I am called upon to remember whether you spell definitely or definitley.

The short story is it's definitely. You might think that that's confusing, because it's not like you say definit-elly, but you see, the e in definitely is silent. In this case, definite is the main part of the word, while -ly is the suffix.

A suffix is a group of letters that are at the end of a word to make a new word. The most common example of a suffix is the s that is added to the end of things, like cats, to indicate that something is plural.

Other examples of suffixes include:

Suffix    Original Word   Suffixed Word

en          Eat                      Eaten

ing         Sleep                  Sleeping

al           accident             accidental

able         tax                       taxable

ly           brother                brotherly

ful           forget                  forgetful

ly           helpful                   helpfully


We have now learnt not only about prefixes but also suffixes, so to top all this off, let's listen to this rap that puts it all together:
 

Hyphen use and other sex tips

As you probably know, MC Grammar is as much into physical love as he is into lingual love.

And when it comes to the world of punctuation, there's no sign that imitates the act of physical love more than the hyphen, which helps bring words together as close as they can be, whilst still retaining their individuality.

Hyphens are used to combine words. They are used for:

• prefixes, such as 'pre' (e.g. pre-paid)
• doubled-up vowels, (e.g. de-emphasised)
• clarifying meaning (e.g. to distinguish them from established words, such as post-war)

The general rule is that you should only use hyphens in the case where there may be more than one way that your sentence could be interpreted. For example, in the sentence

I was laid off

You don't need to bother using a hyphen, because there's no other way that 'laid off' could be interpreted. But you might think about using a hyphen in this sentence:

When I got laid off my face had an outbreak of acne

Here, 'laid off' could mixed up with the term 'off my face' so to make it clear what part of the sentence 'off' belongs to, and things get confusing, so it would help to use a hyphen and say 'laid-off' instead.

When I got laid-off my face had an outbreak of acne

If you're confused about where the hyphen is on your computer, it is on the bottom row here. Try it out for maximum hyphen fun!

MC Grammar, what's the deal with you?

I can hear you asking this question. You want to know how I got like this, right? You want to know how I became an amazing, grammar-knowing, language-loving, word-saying type of guy. Well, let me tell you, it runs in the family.

Recently I found a whole pile of my mother's letters, dated from 1980 to 1982. She died a few years ago, so I took them home to read them and hear what she was up to in the early 80's, apart from having the perm of a god. And let me tell you, these letters revealed something fascinating about her.

My mother had seriously amazing grammar and punctuation skills, probably even better than MC Grammar.

So that's the deal about me, I got it from my momma.

Attack of the Similar Words! Practise vs Practice

An incredible thing happened to me the other day, as I was walking down the street. It was early in the morning, and I was the only one about. With the dew on the leaves, and the clouds still all fresh and pink, it could well have been the first day in creation, and I could have been the first cat who ever wore balloon pants affixed with a leather cummerbund, as I sauntered down that street.

As I turned a corner, I happened to pass by a young dude. He looked like he was in his teens, he had a shock of fluffy blond hair on the top of his head, a red shirt, and a pair of light-coloured jeans on.

I passed him and went along my merry way. I kept walking down the street and after about 20 metres, I made a short-cut through a narrow laneway. Then something very messed up happened: the same boy walked passed me again in the lane way.

For a few second there, my mind was a mess of panicking contortions. There was no way this boy could have made it around the block in the few seconds since I had passed him before. And not only were these people identical in every way, but they were also wearing exactly the same thing.

Of course, after just a few seconds, using the powers of logic that I am so well known for, I worked out that these people were probably twins, and not clones. And since they were funky teen twins (or 'tweenins' as you might consider calling them), they probably (a) had a lot of sibling rivalry, which explained why they didn’t want to walk together, and (b) on their way to school, which was why they were both walking in the same direction.

Another problem solved. But it got me thinking. Just like life, grammar is full of confusing look-alikes that not only look just the same, but almost do exactly the same thing too. So when you come across them in a sentence, you can often find yourself asking ‘WTF? What’s the actual difference between these two words?’

Take for example, the difference between ‘practise’ and ‘practice.’

You might look at these two words and at first you’d be all like ‘Oh, the reason that one of these has an s, and one of these has a c, is because one is an American spelling, and one is a British spelling’ You’d be wrong. In the UK, ‘practice’ and ‘practise’ are both used, while in the US, only ‘practice’ is used. Which kind of doesn’t help at all.

So, just say you don’t live in the wide, glorious land of the United States. Let's just say that although you’ve applied through several channels, you can’t get a work visa. What do you do next?

In the UK and its sexy colony, Australia, ‘practice’ is a noun, while ‘practise’ is a verb. For example:


Dr Wright’s a pretty good doctor. His medical practice is just down the road.


 I need to practise my capoeira, so I can become a dancing warrior.


Are you a practising Catholic?


Meanwhile, at some stage in history, the US decided this was a pretty small detail, and that they were pretty busy and couldn’t really be fucked, and started using ‘practice’ for everything.

It's most likely that there are some cases where North Americans might try to stick to what’s technically correct, but when you are on your tourist's visa in the US, pursuing research into the many practices that Americans engage in, and noting it all down in your field notes, MC Grammar recommends that it’s probably best to stick to that spelling in your field report.

'Alot' or 'a lot'? MC Grammar investigates.

MC Grammar is pretty much the full package when it comes to education, natural intelligence and razor-sharp commonsense. When a problem presents itself to me, I just use the holy trinity of these three qualities to get me through any situation, so I always come up smiling, as well as giving off a warm glow of subtle sexuality and symmetrically good looks.

But even MC Grammar finds it hard to fight his way through the swampy marsh of the confusion surrounding alot and a lot. That’s right, even I had to stop and think about it for a minute.

I don’t know what it is about this tiny speck of grammar, but it’s confused even the greatest minds of history, leaving them to weep, crumpled on the floor in expanding pools of their own urine.

So is it ‘alot’, or ‘a lot’? It’s a lot. 'Alot' isn’t a word. However, it’s used so much that sometimes, even MICROSOFT WORD doesn’t always recognise it as a spelling mistake.

So why all the confusion? Well, these two words feature so much together that it’s hardly surprising that people have started to think that they're the same word. But just because they hang out all the time doesn’t mean that anything’s going on. You’ve got to understand, THEY ARE JUST FRIENDS – for the time being anyway. Who knows what will happen after an evening of just the right amount of fruity lexia, when everyone else has gone home early and since they’re so relaxed around each other, lot just crashes on a's couch for the night, and before they go to bed, a finally opens up about how bad her last break-up was and what she’s looking for in a new relationship, and then they realise how close they’re sitting next to each other.

But until that happens, the rest of us who are just trying to get through every day on the rough streets of grammar have to accept that they are separate words, and alot should always be ‘a lot’.