Neil Krieger, a dad in Boston who died last year from COVID, coined the verb “orbisculate” hoping to get it into the dictionary after his children, Jonathan and Hilary, thought there should be a word for “accidentally squirting juice or pulp into one’s eye from a grapefruit when using a spoon to scoop out a section for eating.” “Compose,” on the other hand, means “to be a part of,” as in “The pie is composed of eight slices.”) (“Comprise” is a verb that means “to consist of,” as in “The pie comprises eight slices. ![]() The Dogged Determination Award has got to go to San Jose, California, computer engineer Brian Henderson who, according to CBS News, once spent four years changing the 16,000 incorrect uses of “comprised of” in Wikipedia to the correct “composed of.” Some of his musings about the English language that can be found on his website,, include: “Why is ‘phonetic’ not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell ‘mnemonic?’ Why doesn’t ‘onomatopoeia’ sound like what it is? Why does the word ‘monosyllabic’ consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for ‘synonym’ or ‘thesaurus’?” Lederer is also known as Conan the Grammarian and Attila the Pun. Lederer has been called the Wizard of Idiom (which is a take-off of the comic strip The Wizard of Id, which was created by Johnny Hart and is itself a play on “The Wizard of Oz” and the Freudian term “id”). ![]() In her latest book, “Rebel With a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian,” Jovin recounts stories from a cross-country trip during which she set up her Grammar Table on various city sidewalks in 47 states and doled out grammatical advice to curious passersby.Īnd then there’s Richard Lederer. ![]() (Fun fact: Research indicates that when male/female couples disagree about a word fact, the woman is usually right.) Questions about commas, apostrophes, participles, prepositions and even spousal disputes began immediately and haven’t stopped. One day in 2018, she decided to set up a Grammar Table by an express subway stop outside her Manhattan apartment.
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