The Final Touch

I love the tips offered by “Gram­mar Girl” Mignon Fog­a­rty on her web­site and pod­casts, and in her email newslet­ters and books. The fol­low­ing is copied from her email newslet­ter which I received today. Very interesting!

What Is a Janus Word?

Bob wrote, “How about weigh­ing in on the word ‘sanc­tion.’ I am con­tin­u­ally con­fused by see­ing the word used in con­texts in which it appears to mean approved by an author­ity, and oth­er­wise condemned.”

“Sanc­tion” is some­thing called a Janus word–a word with two oppo­site mean­ings. Such words are named after the Roman god Janus who has two faces that look in oppo­site direc­tions. Other Janus words are “cleave” (which can mean to cling to or to sep­a­rate), “screen” (which can mean to review or dis­play or to hide or shield from view), and “trim” (which can mean to remove things or add things).

Can you think of other Janus words? Please share in a com­ment here!

Well, it’s not for lack of try­ing, but I have not yet been able to locate a link to an archived record­ing of the Christo­pher Gabriel Pro­gram from yes­ter­day morn­ing when Gram­mar Girl Mignon Fog­a­rty was a guest on his show (970 WDAY Radio out of Fargo, N.D.). I will keep an eye out because yes­ter­day morn­ing, there was a link for his March 3 show.

In the mean­time, the National Gram­mar Day web­site is still live. I invite you to visit and poke around. Among the top “fun finds” is this music video, also acces­si­ble on YouTube, in cel­e­bra­tion of National Gram­mar Day; turns out the Gram­mar Girl has a bit of singing and song-writing tal­ent as well! It’s worth a listen!

I hope you’ll click on the “Play” icon in the video below to hear the whole song. Just one great line to which I can per­son­ally attest: “If you love good gram­mar, you’ll never be bored!”

TIME TO CELEBRATE! It’s NATIONAL GRAMMAR DAY! What do you plan to do to make it special?!

If you see this blog in time, you may want to spend part of the day, begin­ning at 9:10 a.m. PST, lis­ten­ing to Mignon  Fog­a­rty, a.k.a Gram­mar Girl, on the Christo­pher Gabriel Pro­gram on 970 WDAY-AM radio (or by stream­ing audio online). I assume it will also be avail­able as an archive after the fact; check back here in a few hours — I’ll let you know and pro­vide a link if it is.) I don’t know much more about it — I just had the good for­tune to catch Mignon’s post in my News Feed on Face­book — but you can be sure I’ll be there (lis­ten­ing from my home office) with bells on!

I’ve writ­ten about the Gram­mar Girl web­site before on this blog. I highly rec­om­mend it!

Cel­e­brate National Gram­mar Day! And don’t for­get to hug your res­i­dent gram­mar­ian today!

About a year ago, one of my proof­read­ing clients intro­duced me to a char­ac­ter known as “Gram­mar Girl.” She is at the helm of the Quick & Dirty Tips net­work and offers reg­u­lar pod­casts (you can also read them as columns at the Gram­mar Girl web­site), as well as daily gram­mar tips by email subscription.

Gram­mar Girl’s given name is Mignon Fog­a­rty (not as in the steak, I’ve heard her tell an inter­viewer, but as in a flower by that name; I looked it up on dic​tio​nary​.com and Wikipedia and didn’t find any­thing about a flower, but dic​tio​nary​.com came through with the def­i­n­i­tion, “del­i­cately pretty,” besides list­ing it as a female given name). She is a great oral pre­sen­ter — a pleas­ant voice to lis­ten to, infor­ma­tive and funny, both. Besides her online pres­ence, she has writ­ten two books, the most recent The Gram­mar Devo­tional. Check it out! A great resource to learn, or relearn, cru­cial tips for good writ­ing over the course of a year (if you read one a day — though you might get so sucked in that you can’t stop with just one!).

By the way, you’ll notice the Gram­mar Girl link in the side­bar to the right. I lis­ten to her archived pod­casts one after another on my iPod while doing house­work! That’s how much fun gram­mar can be!