Janus Words are words that have two different meanings that are opposite of each other.

From Grammar Girl:

Such words are named after the Roman god Janus who has two faces that look in opposite directions. Other Janus words are “cleave” (which can mean to cling to or to separate), “screen” (which can mean to review or display or to hide or shield from view), and “trim” (which can mean to remove things or add things).

Courtesy of Grammar Girl, an easy way to figure out that who vs. whom thing:

Like “whom,” the pronoun “him” ends with “m.” When you’re trying to decide whether to use “who” or “whom,” ask yourself if the answer to the question would be “he” or “him.” That’s the trick: if you can answer the question being asked with “him,” then use “whom,” and it’s easy to remember because they both end with “m.”

I will still never remember, but I can sure try.

If, like me, you learned to type a million years ago, you learned that you should put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. It turns out that’s no longer true, or so says Grammar Girl anyway, who, as you know, is my preferred authority on things like this, and would probably be appalled at this run on sentence.

Although how many spaces you use is ultimately a style choice, using one space is by far the most widely accepted and logical style. The Chicago Manual of Style (1), the AP Stylebook (2), and the Modern Language Association (3) all recommend using one space after a period at the end of a sentence.

I’m shocked, and a little dismayed, actually. The Wife^® tells me she never included the second space.

Breaking this habit will be painful, if my experience typing this post is any indication.

Yesterday I mentioned the disregard for grammar in the ED’s press release for the Orwell speech.

Today, Hot Air points out that they missed the boat on spelling, as well.

Seriously guys, you get an ‘F’ on this project.

The President is channeling his inner Orwell and planning a speech to our nation’s schoolchildren. Because there is nothing creepy or Soviet-like about our Dear Leader addressing the kiddies. It’s not enough that their teachers indoctrinate them, they need to hear straight from the source.

To support the speech, the Department of Education has made available a list of activities, such as “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president,” to the nation’s teachers.

One would expect a creepy diktat from the Education Department to at least be grammatically correct. But no.

Jim Geraghty over at NRO has the details of the grammatical indiscretions.

ED quietly released a revised activity list later today. Perhaps is was in response to the “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your President” firestorm that it created among the right leaning blogs. Perhaps not.

Either way it reinforced to me that when we’re looking for budget savings, the Department of Education should be first on the list.

Update: I don’t know who Frederick Hess is, but he pretty much nails it, in my opinion:

I’m sure the intentions behind all of this were decent enough, and that this whole effort was intended as a pep talk dressed up with innocuous materials. The lesson plans were likely drawn up by a couple of low-level staffers and slapped up on the department website without a careful look. But this all points to some of the perils posed by the growing presidential inclination to serve as superintendent-in-chief, and it highlights the kind of hubris that has fueled concerns about the implications of the federal government’s growing reach.

Update II: Yet, Vodkapundit makes an equally good point:

The other thing I object to is a big portion (an entire portion?) of a school day being devoted to the President and His Works and Admonishments, for no reason other than he seems to think it should be. There’s no national emergency, this isn’t an inauguration or a joint address to Congress. It’s the President deciding, for reasons entirely his own, to take over the public school system for twenty minutes or an hour or a day.

I’ve always hated the word fiancé, but I never knew that I also had to hate the word fiancée.

It turns out you are supposed to spell the word differently based on if the person you are referencing is a male or a female. (Fiancé(e) being annoyingly French, it takes a male or female form.)

Grammar Girl did the work of finding out what you’d call a whole group of peeps that were waiting to be married…

[...] the proper way to identify a group of male and female people engaged to be married is to call them “affianced couples” or simply “the affianced.” “Affiance,” the verb, is pronounced with the emphasis on the middle syllable: \uh-FYE-unss\

Here’s an example sentence from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged:

The affianced couple will marry next month.

Only slightly less archaic and annoying. $1,000,000,000 to the person who comes up with a better word.

Too many exceptions that aren’t accounted for in the rhyme, they say…

LONDON – It’s a spelling mantra that generations of schoolchildren have learned — “i before e, except after c.”

But new British government guidance tells teachers not to pass on the rule to students, because there are too many exceptions.

The “Support For Spelling” document, which is being sent to thousands of primary schools, says the rule “is not worth teaching” because it doesn’t account for words like ’sufficient,’ ‘veil’ and ‘their.’

We were confusing our French terms. Of course they look relatively different, but they are phonetically pronounced coo-de-gra and coo-de-ta, respectively, thus sounding very similar. Their meanings are very different.

coup de grâce is a “blow of mercy” or a mercy-kill.

coup d’état is the sudden overthrow of a government.

In the situation that made me look this up, there was a coup d’état of a group… I’m surprised the new leadership was not also the coup de grâce.

Radar used to be an acronym for “Radio Detection and Ranging,” but now has entered the language as a real word, and therefore has lost its capitalization.

Radar works by shooting either radio waves or microwaves at an object. A small part of the energy from the wave is reflected back to the antenna. The amount of time it takes for the wave to return allows a calculation to be made to determine the object’s distance.

In the nifty little graphic, the green line is the original wave. The object, which is round, bounces a small portion of the original wave back to the antenna. The returning energy is the blue line.

Based on how long it takes for the blue line to return, the radar’s computer can calculate how far away the blue ball is.

If the blue ball were moving, the radar could find out how fast it is moving by taking several measurements in a row and then calculating the rate of change in the distance over time. Because distance equals rate times time of course.

The same basic principle applies to radar used for weather detection, speed detection (boo!) and ship or airplane detection.

The use of radar for weather detection was actually discovered by accident during WWII. Radar operators noticed that they were getting a lot of interference to their signals when there was rain or snow in the air.

After the war, the scientists who worked on military radar focused on how to interpret this interference to detect weather, leading to the use of radar for weather detection.

Stealth Technology
Most of the time, the same radar antenna acts as both the sender and the receiver. As you saw in the graphic above, a round object reflects only a little bit of the energy back to the antenna. However, if, instead of a ball, the target were flat, more energy would bounce back and the returning signal would be more reliable.

Normal airplanes and ships know this, and include intentional flat features to allow radar to reflect reliably. If you are a passenger airliner, it’s important for the Air Traffic Control radars to be able to find you. So there are specially angled parts added to the airplane to facilitate this. Same goes for trade ships. You want the coast guard to be able to locate you when you send your distress signal.

If you are a stealth military vessel, however, being found by radar is not a good thing. That’s why the stealth bomber looks so odd. It was designed specifically not to reflect radio waves.

The Navy’s new LPD warships (the subject of a future post) do not have a single 90 degree angle on deck. Even the rungs on the ladders are angled so as to not reflect waves.

The military also uses special paints and other materials to absorb rather than reflect radio waves.

Source: Science Channel and wiki

Another from Grammar Girl. This one I’ve been holding on to for a few days while deciding whether or not to share, but since I went crazy with the grammar posts I thought I’d just go for it.

When you want to describe an object using multiple adjectives, there is a proper way to order them.

Adjectives should go in the following order, with opinion first and purpose last:

Opinion (ridiculous, crazy, beautiful)
Size (big, small)
Age (old, young)
Shape (round, square)
Color (yellow, blue)
Origin (American, British)
Material (polyester, styrofoam)
Purpose (swimming, as in “swimming pool”; shooting, as in “shooting range”)

The good news is that you probably do this naturally, so you probably don’t need to bother memorizing the list. The other good news is that nobody knows that there is a rule about this, so no one will catch it if you’re wrong.

The other other good news is that this is the last grammar post of the day! Good news all around!

Source: Grammar Girl