Comments on: Web Site Grammar

By: Lucy Wickwright

Lucy Wickwright — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:21:14 +0000

Sir, Forget trivialities of hyphenation or capitalization. Instead, be concerned that “everytime” is not a word.

By: W. Hayward Johnson

W. Hayward Johnson — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 20:07:28 +0000

Okay. I’ve had it!

Long a believer that, in language, usage trumps academic arcania everytime, I’ve begged of “Web site” and “Web page” (or, I think worse, “Web-site” or “Web-page”) in favor of “website” and “webpage.” AND I generally don’t capitalize “Web” or “Internet” unless they appear at the beginning of sentence (or the former appears in the full moniker: “World Wide Web.”)

I’m getting static about this from all manner of people, despite the fact that both terms — Web and Internet — have become so common in everyday language they’ve almost stopped being proper names and become simple nouns.

So, as far as common usage goes, what’s the final skinny? “Web site” or “website”?

By: Joanna Eleftheriou

Joanna Eleftheriou — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 01:17:36 +0000

I cringe when I hear ‘different than’! I guess I think of ‘than’ as being preceded by a comparative adjective, e.g. harder, better, etc. Different is not a comparative adjective even though you have to compare things to determine whether they’re different or not! You have an apostrophe typo: kind reader’s input is still most certainly valuable. Not only did they
should read readers’ — it’s so odd to make errors while talking about them! I came upon your site when I was looking for an explanation of another of my pet peeves: much different. It’s the same problem: taking different as a comparative.

By: Keith Penton

Keith Penton — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 20:02:59 +0000

Getting back to the original point about “different than/from”, the commonest usage in British English nowadays is “different to”. When I was at school (35 years ago), anything other than “”different from” was plain wrong – mind you, I went to what we call a “grammar school” and studied Latin. I’ve just about reconciled myself to “different to”, despite the contradicition between the “de-” prefix meaning from and the preposition “to”, simply because I now rarely hear people say anything else. “Different than” will always sound wrong to me.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 15:03:49 +0000

Anup, that’s a really interesting example. I find it interesting because your expected audience wasn’t necessarily your actual audience, and you correctly changed your writing behavior to suit them, and not the other way around…

By: Anup Shah

Anup Shah — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 09:29:50 +0000

Slightly aside, though somewhat related, perhaps: a web site of mine for years was written in British (or International?) English?

I got so many emails from Americans who thought I had spelling mistakes everywhere. One professional writer from the US even offered to help me (as he liked my site, but my writing was generally poor anyway!). But even he didn’t realize I was using British english.

In the end, given that some 70 to 90% of my readership was from the US, I began to write in American English instead. No complaints since. I would guess most people are familiar with US English through culture, the online world and so on.

Will that one day become the defacto English?

By: Chris McEvoy

Chris McEvoy — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 07:43:36 +0000

Whilst we are discussing the subject of word usage on Brain Sparks. What is the thinking behind the use of the partial phrase “think tan” in the top banner image on this page?

Some people may have assumed that this phrase is just a clipped version of “think tank”, but I don’t think that this is the case.

If it was meant to be think tank then the designer would have included part of the missing k in the clipped image in the same way that they have clipped “web design” in the same image.

No there is definitely something else happening here:

Perhaps Jared is just daydreaming about next holiday in Barbados.

Maybe he wants us to extend our web pallets to include more than just red, green and blue.

He could be encouraging us to read the books of Amy Tan and is drawing our attention to his “yin eyes” which help to provide his insights.

And don’t even get me started on that bleedin logo. Since when did sparks appear as a wave? And why aren’t the sparks/waves being directed outward to other people rather than being transmitted to the persons bottom.