Nice try, but it's still full of exceptions. To make the above jingle accurate, it'd need to be something like: I before e, except after c Or when sounded as 'a' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh' Unless the 'c' is part of a 'sh' sound as in 'glacier' Or it appears in comparatives and superlatives like 'fancier' And also except when the vowels are sounded as 'e' as in 'seize' Or 'i' as in 'height' Or also in '-ing' inflections ending in '-e' as in 'cueing' Or in compound words as in 'albeit' Or occasionally in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages as in 'cuneiform' Or in other numerous and random exceptions such as 'science', 'forfeit', and 'weird'.

“Have you brought your time sheet up to date yet?”

En dashes, which are about the width of an upper-case N, are often mistaken for hyphens. But, traditionally, en dashes function as a kind of super hyphen. They’re meant to give you a little extra glue when you have a compound modifier that includes a multi-word element that can’t easily be hyphenated. For example, the phrase Elvis Presley–style dance moves uses an en dash because Elvis-Presley-style dance moves is awkward; “Elvis Presley” isn’t a compound modifier, so hyphenating it looks odd. But, keep in mind, not all readers will notice en dashes or understand what they mean. Sometimes, it’s better to simply reword the phrase. Elvis Presley–style dance moves or: dance moves like Elvis Presley’s pre–World War II buildings or: buildings constructed before World War II En dashes are also used to show ranges of numbers, such as times, page numbers, or scores (I’ll schedule you from 4:30–5:00). But, outside of formal printed publications, this type of en dash is commonly replaced with a simple hyphen.

The easy way to tell if you need who or whom is to substitute it for he or him and see which one makes sense.

Lie: I felt sick, so I lay down.Here’s where it can get a bit tricky. The past tense of lie is lay, but not because there is any overlap between the two verbs. So when you say, “I lay down for a nap,” you’re actually using the verb lie, not lay, despite the way it sounds.

the Corpus was also used as a basis for grammar and language reference titles as well as dictionaries.

tell read_xlsx() take

as

It was the schoolteacher and writer Anne Fisher whose English primer of 1745 began the notion that it's somehow bad to use they in the plural and that he stands for both men and women.

In a delightful book, Founding Grammars: How Early America’s War Over Words Shaped Today’s Language (St Martin’s Press, 309 pages, $27.99), Rosemarie Ostler traces an arc that keeps repeating itself: A writer offers advice about language, his followers and schoolteachers convert the advice into dogma, and the public plumps for easy-to-follow rules, however bogus, over nuances and judgments.