English Grammar

Some English idiosyncrasies

Missing Words …

The female equivalent for brethren and fraternal used to exist.. and now are no longer used.

Brethren is known as brotherhood..So what about the good ol' sisterhood,

Well fear not there is a word sistren and Don’t bother looking it up in Microsoft word, you wont find it ( psst.. that’s because it’s English;)

How about fraternal love…Heard about sororal love

Have you noticed ?

3 consecutive letters are repeated? Try to think of another one!! Bookkeeper

Flammable and inflammable

Both mean the same.

Facetious. All the vowels follow each other in the same order

Now forming a word with the letter Q. Well in pure English there is just one word that does not have a “u” following a “Q”. the word is qwerty- the standard layout of typewriters and keyboards

Know what a contranym is?

I’m sure our study of antonyms and synonyms would not have thrown this one at us.A contranym is a word that has opposing meanings.

E.g.: Cleave: separate or cut with a tool “cleave the bone"

Cleave also means come or be in close contact with; stick or hold together and resist separation; cleave to one's principles

how about some punctuation?

Grammar school taught us that a comma before and was not acceptable, and we lapped it up. However we did use it and made huge mistakes in our tests. Here is good news and maybe you want to go back to school to get some well deserved marks from your grammar teacher.

Oxford comma: This optional comma/punctuation was introduced by oxford, the comma can used before and to clarify the sentence.

e.g

These items are available in black and white, red and yellow, and blue and green.

Well thats some food for thought... Post me some comments if you find some more

adios!