Tag: Writing

January is Festivus Time

By Joe Diorio

January 2024

I save the month of January to share grammatical rants from myself and readers of this newsletter. Here are a few:

The Washington Post on December 26 reported that the Miami Dolphins for the National Football League “grinded out” a victory with a 22 – 20 win over the Dallas Cowboys. I am not the most ardent NFL fan (Although I do follow the New York Giants, who I affectionately say are in year 12 of a five-year rebuilding plan.) but my ear tells me perhaps the Dolphins “ground out” a victory.

Welp, it seems my ear is correct. To use my professor-sounding voice, “grind” is an irregular verb, meaning it does not follow accepted and delineated conjugation rules. The past tense of “grind” is actually “ground.”  So, the Dolphins ground out a victory. If you think about it, you would not say “I grinded some coffee to brew.”

Pack my what?

I can only speak for myself, but it grinds on my nerves when I hear a news report about crowds at airports and the reporter tells viewers to “pack their patience.” It isn’t how people normally talk. In fact, “pack your patience” isn’t even an accepted idiom in the English language. (Honest. I checked.) Take a deep dive into the statement and you quickly realize it doesn’t even make sense. An idiom is a statement of the exact meaning of the word. If you pack something you cannot easily access it, so why pack patience if you are going to need it while waiting in a TSA line? Free advice to news writers; “be patient” works better than “pack your patience.”

News crawls. The bane of TV news

The news crawl – the running text of headlines appearing at the bottom of the TV screen – at ABC News on Christmas morning suggested everyone, including the news crawl editor, had the day off. See the photo below.

And the on-screen text accompanying news of the passing of Rosalynn Carter, who was 96 years old at the time of her death, demonstrates that haste can indeed make waste.

Sundry fun stuff

Things that come to my attention, via some online forums I follow.

  1. Thinking about the time I said I was distantly related to Marie Curie and a guy corrected me, saying, “I think you mean Mariah Carey.”
  2. Study finds that atheists are more likely to own cats and Christians. Is it legal to own a Christian?
  3. “Fun fact: the blending of idioms is called a malaphor, as in “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

Happy New Year, and let’s write carefully out there, people.

Joe Diorio is the author of “A Few Words About Words. A common-sense look at writing and grammar” (Beaufort Books, 2021) and “Murders at Trask: Crisis communications and the art of making nothing happen.” (Beaufort Books, May 2024).

A Few Words About Words with Dava Guerin

Talking to a long-time friend about my book.

Dava Guerin, author of multiple books, including “Rebuilding Sergeant Peck: How I put body and soul back together after Afghanistan,” “Presidents, Kings, and Convicts: My journey from the Tennessee governor’s residence to the halls of Congress,” and “The Eagle on My Arm: How the wilderness and birds of prey saved a veteran’s life,” took some time to talk to me about my book, “A Few Words About Words. A common-sense look at writing and grammar,” which hits bookstores on August 10. Dava and I worked together at Ketchum Public Relations in Philadelphia in the 1980s.