I am an editor and fitness teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Dreams of pursuing a PhD still fill my head, because the bachelor's and MBA are not enough. I helped Abbas move to NYC several thousand years ago, so you might say this site is partially my fault. Email: gcdurham [at] yahoo.com
by Gabrielle C. Durham Do you remember when the Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw suggested significant changes to English spelling so that it would make more sense? Probably not, because it was more than 70 years ago. According to him and, likely, some predecessors, English spelling was so goofy that ghoti could be…
by Gabrielle C. Durham If you grew up in the Western Hemisphere, chances are good that you heard or read several fairytales by the Brothers Grimm as a child. Examples include “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Less well known, and for good reason, are stories of…
by Gabrielle C. Durham My friend does not use punctuation when he texts, so there is a stream-of-consciousness quality to much of his communications. According to the fine folks at Buzzfeed, you would likely infer that he is a millennial, but that is not true. He conveys his points while eschewing syntactic finality fairly clearly,…
by Gabrielle C. Durham Whether we’re glancing through a play from high school before donating it or wandering through an antique shop, sometimes we see a word that doesn’t look quite right. Sometimes, misspelled words are a result of advertising campaigns, and other times they are alternate spellings in English. We all know English has…
by Gabrielle C. Durham Did completing your taxes seem a Herculean task? Did cleaning your adolescent bedroom compare to mucking the Augean stables? Are you more jovial or saturnine by nature? Do you or anyone you know suffer from narcissism? Did you see the movie Titanic? Have you ever been hypnotized? Do you want to…
by Gabrielle C. Durham If you took Latin, then you probably have a larger vocabulary than the average bear, and you are more likely to have strong opinions on some words you vaguely remember based on Latin roots (cognates). For example, folks are more commonly using “decimate” to mean destroy or devastate, and it annoys…
by Gabrielle C. Durham Have you ever been asked to donate to the worthy cause of sending the Lady Loins to the state semi-finals? I have, and I think I gave a couple bucks because of the doubtlessly unintentional prurience of the street fund-raising efforts of these aspiring young athletes and their lacking sign-makers. As…
by Gabrielle C. Durham I teach two kinds of group exercise classes, and part of the certification processes for both disciplines devoted no small amount of attention to how to speak to your minions, uh, students. Negative forecasting is a no no. (Example: “Don’t think about the searing pain you’re probably feeling” is not considered…
by Gabrielle C. Durham A friend asked me to write a column about Russian cursing a few months ago. I do try to be accommodating, so I looked at several sites to get a better handle on it. In case you were not familiar, cursing in Russian is rich, much more calorically dense than most…
by Gabrielle C. Durham In the immortal words of Prince Rogers Nelson’s party gem from 1982: “But life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last . . . “So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.” So much fun stuff happened in 1999: rampant concern about Y2K; the movie “The Matrix” came…
by Gabrielle C. Durham Certain phrases choke us with their ubiquity at some point: “Just do it.” (Nike) “Let’s get ready to rumble!” (Sports announcer Michael Buffer) “That’s hot.” (Paris Hilton) “Hasta la vista, baby.” (“Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” as delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger) Did you know these have all been trademarked? This means that…
by Gabrielle C. Durham We can agree that a verb in the present tense means that action is occurring now. What about the present progressive, which I used in the previous statement? That apparently confounds non-native English speakers because it means that an action is in the middle of happening. Friends have asked me, “What…
by Gabrielle C. Durham When you consume a meal, do you eat cow or beef? Yes, these are the same, especially considering where they end up, but we tend to think of the cow as the beginning of this particular process, and the beef as the product. More of these pairings include calf/veal, swine or…
by Gabrielle C. Durham I like playing Scrabble, and part of the reason is creating new words. That and the smack talk. I played a game with the swain of the day decades ago, and he challenged my word, which was not in and of itself surprising. As you may recall, if you lose a…
by Gabrielle C. Durham Grief by Londiwe Buthelezi It rips through your body. Grazing, raking, shaving away all the protective layers you put up all those years before. layers you used to cover all the pain you couldn’t possibly show to others. Grief exposes you. shows everyone what you really are like inside. raw and…
by Gabrielle C. Durham Folks love to pick on passive constructions. “Passive sentences are too wordy. They are unclear. They gave me a bruise.” Two out of three of these are objectively wrong. The third I can’t help you with. Passive voice provides a valuable service. We all know when something bad happens, even if…
by Gabrielle C. Durham “In receiving this award, I thank my parents, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Mr. T.” This is my twist on the importance of the serial or Oxford comma, the comma that should follow “Gabor” and precede “and.” I was indoctrinated at a young age, which as we know is the best time…
by Gabrielle C. Durham “Griselda was fighting against the patriarchy the only way she knew – through her unquenchable lust for venison.” A romance or porn writer I am not, but what should strike you, other than the inappropriate sexualization of wild game, is the utterly superfluous preposition “against.” Why can’t Griselda simply fight the…