The word euphonic perfectly sums up a theory I have. It means “nice-sounding,” and Merriam-Webster specifies that it often describes “the acoustic effect produced by words so formed or combined as to please the ear.”

The word euphonic is itself euphonic, and here’s why, I believe: It has a stressed second syllable: you-FAH-nick (in the US, that is—see the blue image above).

I can’t explain why (maybe you can, in the comments), but I feel that words with three or more syllables and a stressed second syllable are often the best-sounding words. For example*:

emphatic
vehicular
bombastic
calamity (my favorite word)
exculpatory
recidivism
velocipede
rapscallion
infantilize
barbaric
insidious
pernicious
voluptuous
etc., etc.

Sure, there are plenty of great monosyllabic words—shank, shiv, minx, jinx, and so on—but when I look at my ever-growing list of favorite words, I’m struck by this second-syllable phenomenon.

Phenomenon: There’s another one. Phenomenal, right?

​*Even example falls into this stressed-second-syllable category, but it’s used so frequently it can’t feel too thrilling.

I received this message on LinkedIn yesterday:

I had not written on this topic. I’d never even thought about the relationship between these two words. I couldn’t imagine what contentment had to do with containment.

I was all too familiar with the ubiquitous noun “content.” In fact, I’ve railed against that term. I hate the way it’s used these days to refer to so much writing—including blogs like this one. To me, it just connotes “void-filler,” and it’s an insult.

But how about the adjective content, describing a state of contentedness? What was that all about? I went straight to the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary and got the answer. 

In other words, if what you want falls pretty well within the bounds of what you have, you’re content.

Interesting, right? It immediately made me think of two things.

One was a powerful photography exhibit I saw many years ago at the art museum in Lakeland, Florida. In each photograph, a family was posed in front of their home with all their possessions. The families were from around the world, and I remember the shocking surfeit of stuff* Americans owned compared to their counterparts in other countries. You couldn't help but wonder, as you looked at these photos, what we really need in our lives, and why we’re so driven to acquire more and more things.

By the way, you can get a book of these photographs called Material World: A Global Family Portrait. And the irony is not lost on me that I’ve just invited you to acquire something. (Plus, I used an affiliate link so that I could acquire something myself—0.0004¢ if I’m lucky.)

The second thing I thought of was a scene involving two yachts. I’d read it in the delightful, entertaining, and informative book by Richard Conniff called The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (another affiliate link). The scene took place at a time when

... Oracle’s stock was soaring and Larry Ellison briefly passed Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to become the world’s second-richest person. Ellison was celebrating aboard his 243-foot yacht off Capri. Then he spotted a 200-foot yacht heading out on a twilight cruise to the village of Positano. It was Paul Allen’s Meduse ... Ellison ordered his captain to crank his yacht’s three engines to full speed. He overtook Allen’s yacht at forty miles an hour, throwing up a huge wake that sent Allen and his guests staggering. “It was an adolescent prank,” Ellison told The Washington Post afterward. “I highly recommend it.”

Don’t recommend it to me, buddy. I think it makes you sound like an insecure, childish fool. I can’t imagine feeling compelled to do such a thing.

​The book is filled with anecdotes like this—of obscenely rich people not merely displaying their wealth, but rubbing others’ noses in it. Conniff explains that such behavior is natural, because we’re mammals who want to achieve and demonstrate dominance.

Yes, I’m a mammal. And I’m not an ascetic, by any means. But I don’t run with the crowd that yachts around the Gulf of Naples. So the “adolescent prank” above just strikes me a bizarre and kind of ... pathetic. It’s the very opposite of contentment. It’s not enough for this guy to be be the second-richest person in the world—he has to literally push his zillionaire adversary around with his huge pleasure craft. I mean: 🙄.

Contentment gets the suspicious side-eye in America, particularly on LinkedIn, land of hustling, humblebragging overachievers. According to all the “boss babes” and “bropreneurs,” you must never stop “crushing it.” You have to “stay hungry,” even if Americans have so many calories available that staying slim has become a $90 billion industry. “Never settle,” we’re commanded. “Manifest that shit.” (A search for that sentence pulls up five thousand results on Etsy.)

I have goals, sure. But when I look at the Venn diagram of my life, I know I’m living very happily inside my “what I have” circle. I love it here. I appreciate it here. I’m content here.

Ohhhhhhh. Now everything began to make sense. (Why did it take me so long to figure this out?)

I decided to go right to the horse’s robotic mouth:

There you have it. AI says that “price-slashin’” is “just a fun and informal way to describe” something.

No, it’s not. It’s weird and awkward and distractingly hokey. It took up a lot of my brain-space today.

So let me say this to Priceline and others of their ilk. Please listen to this living, breathing, HUMAN copywriter. Your brand matters. It is the lifeblood, the heartbeat, the personality of your company. With just a pinch of exaggeration and poetic license I’ll say that it’s the very soul of your company. It’s what makes human beings (read: customers, potential customers, partners, etc.) remember you. Understand you. And ideally, LIKE you. Take care of your brand, for crying out loud!

Penny and the rest of her AI brethren do not care about your brand. The question is, do you?

Recently I gave a CreativeMornings FieldTrip presentation online. I began by asking attendees what words, punctuation, or grammar they struggle with the most. Several people mentioned the semicolon, and one participant wrote this:​

The poor little semicolon! So misunderstood! So unfairly reviled! Even after serving us for so many years as the friendly emoticon wink. ;-)

Please allow me to demystify my friend the semicolon. I want to allay your fears and enable your enjoyment. 

First, forget the word colon and instead think of the semicolon as a period riding around on the shoulders of a comma. It’s kind of like a hybrid of those two punctuation marks, but it has very specific uses. Two, to be exact.

1) It enables two conceptually connected sentences to hold hands.

Sometimes you’ll have two sentences that feel like they belong together. Rather than separating them with a harsh full-stop period, you can let them indulge in a public display of affection by placing a semicolon between them. Like so:

You want to raise Madagascar hissing cockroaches; I want a divorce.

I guess I’m past due for an oil change; my engine appears to have caught fire.

His phone never leaves his hands; I shudder to think of the microbes it hosts.

That “man of God” sure owns a lot of Lamborghinis; I guess he’s answered the age-old question, “What would Jesus drive?”

(Notice that the first letter following the semicolon doesn’t get capitalized unless it’s a proper noun or the word I. You’ve turned two sentences into one.)

​2) It tidies up and clarifies complex lists.

Usually when you punctuate a series of things, commas will easily do the job of separating one thing from the next. Like this:

I notice you’re buying rubber gloves, a ski mask, a gun, and bleach.* Got plans for the weekend?

But sometimes, the items in your series are complex:

• Bacon Level, Alabama
• French Lick, Indiana
• Zzyzx, California

In this case, you could use semicolons to separate the three listed places:

The shell corporation had offices in Bacon Level, Alabama; French Lick, Indiana; and Zzyzx, California.

Those semicolons reduce the chaos and make things easier to read, right?

Another example might be:

The featured speakers at the triplets convention were Huey, Louie, and Dewey Gravelpit; Sandy, Mandy, and Candy Shrinklepie; and Ed, Ned, and Fred Pseudonym.

That’s it! Now you know how to use the semicolon!

To review: You can use a semicolon 1) to bring two sentences together or 2) to keep several complicated phrases apart. Either way, it’s making the world a better place.

Thanks, semicolon; I'm sorry I've been bad-mouthing you for so long.
​
The semicolon never hurt anybody; it only wants to help.

You don’t need a PhD to use a semicolon; it’s here for everybody.

I could keep doing this all day; instead, I’ll let you go forth and punctuate.

A weird thing happened. Two weird things.

On Thursday, I was talking with my friend Vickie. She was struggling to remember the name of the bird pictured above. She said she always has trouble remembering this name, and she began to describe the bird.

“MAGPIE!” I blurted out. “I always have trouble remembering that name, too! It’s on my list called ‘Words I can never remember.’”

That was the first weird thing: magpie eludes both Vickie and me.

Then tonight, my husband and I were struggling to remember the word that describes large-spotted animals like paint horses and our dog Freddy, shown here. I had to lean on ChatGPT to remind me. The word is piebald.

“Is that her with the ponytail?” asked Karen.

“That might be her,” said Chris.

Welcome to Do You Need a Ride?, one of my favorite podcasts, hosted by comedians Karen Kilgariff and Chris Fairbanks. The show’s schtick is that Karen and Chris provide a sort of taxi service for their comedian friends, driving them to or from the airport or other places and engaging in hilarious conversation in the car.

The snippet of dialogue above happened when Karen and Chris were picking up comedian Sara Schaefer. And technically, both Karen and Chris made a mistake. If they wanted to be grammatically proper, they would have said:

“Is that she with the ponytail?”

“That might be she.”

Record-scratch. Yuckola! That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Snooty. Antiquated. Ridiculous.

Here’s why it’s (again, technically) correct, though. In English, the pronoun she serves as a subject, while the pronoun her serves as an object.

She published her manifesto. (She is the subject.)

The FBI called her in for questioning. (Her is the object.)

She wore her mink overalls to the Oscars. (She is the subject.)
​
PETA has been giving her a lot of unwelcome attention. (Her is an object.)

The sentences spoken by Karen and Chris include what’s called a linking verb, which works like an equal sign in an equation:

She is a ventriloquist.

He is a scoundrel.

You are a nightmare.

We are taxidermists.
​
They are flat-earthers.

Similarly, Karen and Chris were essentially expressing this equation:

that (person) = Sara Schaefer

If we reduce that equation properly we get:

that = Sara
        ⬇
that = she
        ⬇
That is she.

The sentence is simply stating [Subject] equals [something]. There’s no object, so there’s no need for the object pronoun her. The correct pronoun is she.

Similarly, back in the days when we would actually answer telephones, if a caller asked for us by name, we might respond, “This is she” or “This is he.” Pompous, but proper.

But some rules just need to be broken, and Karen and Chris did exactly what they should have done. They threw the pretentious That is she construction out the car window and went with the perfectly acceptable (preferable, really​) That is her approach instead.

And you can too. As with all speaking and writing, you should consider your audience, your circumstances, the medium, and the mood. You can always break the rules in English, but it’s good to know you’re breaking them.

I suppose I can see the appeal of collecting insects—organizing them, labeling them, pinning them to boards. But I far prefer my own collection: words.

I've written about them before, sharing some noteworthy "bad" words and grody words. But today I want to share my growing list entitled "words I'd like to use." See, when I read good writing, I'll often stop and think, "Why don't I ever use that word? It's a terrific word!" And I add it to the list. 

Behold! Here is my treasured assemblage of fabulous words that I hope to pull out of mothballs more often so I can delight in them.

acolyte
admonish, admonition, admonishment
anguish
capitulate
captivate
castigate
cataclysm
clandestine
condemn, condemnation
consecrate
contempt
corrosive
craven
debase
debauchery
defamatory
deferential
degenerate
degrading, degradation
dejected
denounce, denunciation
depravity
desecrate
devoted
diminish
enumerate
exculpatory
execrable
forbearance
gormless
habituate
imperative
incendiary
indignity
iniquity, iniquitous
irascible
judicious
impediment
inscrutable
inveigle
insubordinate
lament, lamentation
manifold
obstinate 
obstreperous
oracle
paradox
pernicious
plutocrat
polarize, polarizing
polemic
postulate
potentate
predatory, predation
predilection
premonition
preternatural
profane
propitious
rebuke
recalcitrant
recriminations
remonstrate
reprobate
resolute
reticent
rhapsodize
rhetoric
sensibility
sorcery
spasmodic
speculate
subordinate
tacit
treachery
vacuous
venerated
vitriolic
vituperative
voluptuary

Now, butterfly collectors get to call themselves lepidopterists. But I'm not really wild about that word—it reminds me of chiropodist. I far prefer logophile. I like it so much, in fact, that I turned it into a shirt that you might say fits me to a tee.

As I began to write this blog, Weebly gave me the following placeholder text at the top of the page.

Those little dots are all over the place!

Let’s get to know them better, shall we?

What is an ellipsis?

An ellipsis (plural: ellipses) is a punctuation mark comprising three periods in a row. (Whether or not there are spaces between these periods is a matter of style. More on that later.)

​I learned from Keith Houston in his wonderful book Shady Characters that the word “ellipsis” comes from the Greek élleipsis, meaning “to fall short” or “to leave out.”

How is the ellipsis used?

I’m so glad you asked. It can perform a few different tasks, outlined below.

An ellipsis can communicate a “trailing off.”

In this case, the ellipsis can act with the sentence-terminating power of a period. No additional period is necessary, and the subsequent sentence begins with a capitalized letter.

Where the heck is my wallet? I had it when I was leaving the bar. I put it on the roof of the car, and … Oh, no.

If you need that trailed-off sentence to be question-esque, then pop a question mark on the end.

Could this ice pick be the one that was used … ?

Similarly, if you need to get exclamatory, add an exclamation point.

What do you mean, you’re my boyfriend’s wife? You can’t possibly … !

An ellipsis can be used mid-sentence to convey faltering.

I didn’t lie under oath, exactly … I mean … I was being … poetic.

Let me point out here: Practically every writing authority says you should seriously try to avoid these “pausing ellipses.” Evidently, they’re annoying to read. You (and I) have been warned.

An ellipsis can say, “Text has been removed from this spot.”

This is really the primary job of the ellipsis.

If you pull out words from the middle of a sentence, you can indicate it like this:

A witness stated, “I saw the … spaceship land right on the polo field.”

Or let’s say you had a three-sentence quote and removed the middle sentence (“Its fleece was white as snow,” here):

“Mary had a little lamb. … Everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”

Notice how right after the word lamb, there’s:

1. a sentence-ending period
2. a standard après-period (single) space
3. the ellipsis, announcing a missing chunk of text
4. another space (more on that below)
5. another complete quoted sentence (which begins with a capital letter, as all sentences should)

You don’t typically need an ellipsis at the beginning or end of a quotation.

In Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print—and How to Avoid Them Bill Walsh makes this curmudgeonly point: “It’s silly to indicate omission at the beginning or end of a quote, since virtually all quotes are from people who have spoken before in their lives and will do so again.”

Obviously—and importantly—you never want to misrepresent anyone’s sentiments, but if you eliminate the beginning of their sentence without changing the intended meaning of the quote, you can then portray the truncated sentence with a capitalized “first” word.

For example, if in real life I rhapsodize, “I love cauliflower so much that I believe it is a perfectly good choice for breakfast,” then the journalist following me around might quote me this way: “Cauliflower … is a perfectly good choice for breakfast.”

The interior life of an ellipsis: Should there be spaces in there?

Most of the resources I use, including my go-to Chicago Manual of Style, say that you should put a single space between each of the three dots, like so:

But if you do that for self-published online writing, you’re liable to end up with an occasional bad line break, with one or two dots at the end of one line and the remainder on the next—a bad look. Here’s one solution: Insert a non-breaking space before every dot to ensure the whole bunch stays together. To create a non-breaking space:

• On a PC, type ctrl + shift + space.
• On a Mac, type option + space.​​

You might be better off using the AP’s ellipsis style (like I’m doing in this blog), which dictates three dots in a row—no spaces between them. Now, when I type three consecutive periods on my Mac, a nifty thing happens: My three dots magically transmogrify into a solid ellipsis. It has a smidge of non-breaking space (but not quite a full space) in between its three dots, and they stay together, never to be separated. You can see a difference, if barely:

In places where this doesn’t happen automatically, I can type option + semicolon on my Mac to achieve it. The internet tells me that on a PC, you can hold down the alt key while typing 0133, or if you’re in Word, you can type ctrl + alt + period.

Oh, yay: a bizarre exception.

Just when I thought I had the two ellipsis styles (gapped and non-gapped) straight, I read this line from Bill Walsh in Lapsing into a Comma: “In headlines, … I prefer, like many publications, to omit the spaces between ellipses entirely.” Everywhere else, though, he puts spaces between the dots.

Neat, huh? The authorities swing from one ellipsis style to another if it suits them.

Relevant aside: I removed words from the middle and the end of Walsh’s complete quote above, but I didn't change his meaning.

Swaddle your ellipses in space.

Interior space is one thing; exterior space is another. The ellipsis is kind of standoffish most of the time. It likes to have a single space to its left and and a single space to its right in almost every scenario. Check out all the characters an ellipsis buffers itself against with a space.

The comma:

“I turned on the light, … and then I realized the kitchen was filled with raccoons.”

The semicolon:

“Randy knew he had to redeem himself … ; he spent the weekend cleaning the gutters, the windows, the chimney, and his text history."

The colon:

“Here is what I want … : a martini, a cigar, and several more martinis.”

The exclamation point:

Her eyes took on the shape and size of hubcaps as she uttered, “You can’t seriously … !”

The question mark:

“But Sally,” lisped her little brother, “how could the Tooth Fairy know … ?”

Words:

​As you can see in all my examples in this blog, there’s always a space between an ellipsis and the nearest word.

The only creature an ellipsis seems willing to allow to get close to it is a quotation mark.

Lady Gaga shot back, “If I had a dollar for every time someone …” Then she took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and strode away.

In UX/UI, spaceless seems to be the style.

On websites these days, we’re often coaxed to “continue reading” or to proceed further down some marketing funnel. This generally happens with a brief piece of text followed immediately by an ellipsis—with no spaces whatsoever.

In fact, on the AP Stylebook website, just beneath its guidance to put a space on either side of an ellipsis, there’s this flagrant contradiction:

In conclusion …

In “real” writing (no need to fret about your texts and DMs, and UX/UI seems to be a renegade universe):

• Consistency is queen. Decide how you want to approach ellipses and then stick with your approach.
• Don’t let your ellipses get torn asunder. Keep those three dots together. Don’t let a line break separate them.
• If looks matter, take extra care. If you’re doing actual typesetting in Canva or similar, don’t let a line break push an ellipsis to the beginning of a line.
• Ellipses are standoffish. You almost always want a space on either side of your ellipses.

This is just the tip of the ellipsis iceberg, dear reader. The Chicago Manual of Style can take you into topics like French, Italian, and Russian ellipses, to brackets and beyond. If that sounds like your cup of hot chocolate, well then …

Affiliate link alert: The two books mentioned above include affiliate links. And I’ll give you a few more, with these resources I consulted while writing this piece:

• Common Errors in English Usage by Paul Brians
• Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer
• Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner, though you might be better off with his newer Modern English Usage
• The Gregg Reference Manual by William A. Sabin, also now available in a later edition​

​

A lot of people collect things. Bobbleheads. Beer bottles. Barbie dolls. 

I, on the other hand, refuse to collect anything. Or I should say: I refuse to collect anything that takes up space, collects dust, or requires special insurance coverage.

What I collect are words. I currently have nineteen different lists with titles like “naughty words I'll probably never use,” “malapropisms,” “eggcorns,” and “good names.” I collect words that sound mellifluous, that paint a vivid picture, or that simply perform a specific job beautifully. You can see a number of words I treasure here.

One of my lists is entitled “terrible words.” These are words that are difficult to pronounce or unpleasant to hear or that sound like the wrong part of speech. Some just rub me the wrong way.

My “terrible words” list was on my mind this week when I was shopping for postage stamps online. I noticed that the USPS has collection of Forever stamps dedicated to—of all things—backyard games. The collection’s eight different stamps cover everything from badminton to bocce, including cornhole. “Cornhole” has been #5 on my “terrible words” list for years. And coincidentally, it appears directly above “philately,” which means “stamp collecting,” but sounds like an adverb and has a sadistic number of l-sounds in it. Two thumbs down.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my “terrible words” list with you. And no, “moist” does not appear on it. I’m a copywriter who needs to write evocatively about cake from time to time, and I’m not about to take “moist” out of commission. Also, I remain in the minority that just doesn’t mind “moist.” I’ll write it again, looking you directly in the metaphorical eye. Moist.

If that made you uncomfortable, you may want to quit reading. Things are about to get a whole lot worse.

​Here we go—my list of terrible words:

​conurbation
ombudsman
contumely (A NOUN!)
smegma
cornhole
philately
sack/sac
diphthong
crampons
taintworm
epiglottis
crepuscular
suppurate
flaccid
fistula
crotch
contrariety
sillily
monthslong
palimpsest
shunt
stalk (the noun)
wilily
brobdingnagian
Behance
bespoke
carbuncle
sackbut
crumhorn 
ornerier
spendthrift
vuln
fleshpot 
I don't think it's *terrible*, but prolix has no business being an adjective.
severalty
spurtle

A number of my friends contributed to this list. (Thanks, Heather and David and everyone else.) One person wrote this gem: “‘Crepuscular’ is like a beautiful woman named Hagatha.’” (Apologies to all the Hagathas out there.)

How about you? Are there words that make you cringe? Please share!

Today is my (and my husband’s) 29th wedding anniversary. So I thought I’d tell you the story of how we got engaged. 

Bob (the now-husband) and I were living in Boston and had just seen the movie Rambling Rose in the theater. It was dark outside and we were crossing Dartmouth Street in front of Copley Plaza (as seen in the photograph) when Bob suddenly asked, “Would you marry me?”

We were literally in the middle of the street, right about where that arrow is pointing in the photo.

Now, if you know me, what happened next will not surprise you. But it may appall you.

“Would I marry you?” I asked.

You see, would can be conditional. It can convey a hypothetical situation. I didn’t know if Bob meant “Would you marry me if I were the last man on earth?” or “Would you marry me if I were Robert Duvall and you were Diane Ladd?” I didn’t want to answer the wrong question.

So I asked for clarification. And despite the perfect opportunity (and a pretty good incentive, now that I think about it) to back out, Bob rephrased his question and explained that he was, indeed, asking me to marry him.

We were now on the other side of Dartmouth Street (hello, Rubicon). And the question had been clearly articulated. It was my turn to answer.

​I didn’t say yes. I just looked at Bob and nodded my head. I knew better than to try to use any words.