Ukraine has been in the news a lot lately, but if you’re a bit on the older side, you may remember that it used to be more common to call it “the Ukraine,” with that article in front: the Ukraine.

Have you ever wondered why some countries have “the” in the name and others don’t? Why is it the Philippines but simply Greece? Why is it the Netherlands, but simply India? 

Is it really so simple that we just don’t add the definite article “the” to Greece and India? 

Most countries don’t take a definite article, of course, and it sounds ridiculous when you add one to them: “the France,” “the Greece,” “the India.” It sounds silly!

But there are a handful of countries that do take definite articles, and there are two main patterns.

The Gambia

First,  it seems that many countries whose names derive from important geographical features take a definite article. For example, “the Philippines” refers to the Philippine islands, “the Gambia” refers to the Gambia River,  and “the Netherlands” literally means “the lowlands.” (For comparison, think about  the names of geographical regions, such as “the Amazon” and “the Sahara.”)

Second, we have the United States of America and the United Kingdom, both of which take a definite article because the countries’ names describes their political organization. (This becomes clearer when you consider similar formations in many countries’ official names, such as “the Republic of China” [another name for Taiwan] or “the Russian Federation” or “the United Mexican States.”)

For most countries’ names in English, the presence or lack of a definite article is settled. But with a few countries, there’s still a debate about whether to use “the.”

(The) Ukraine

A handful of countries take definite articles, and there are two main patterns.

And that takes us back to (the) Ukraine. Both “the Ukraine” and “Ukraine” have been used in English, but “Ukraine” alone has been becoming more common, and “Ukraine” alone is AP style, so that is what you will see and hear in most news stories today.

It’s common to hear that the name comes from the word “Ukrayina,” which means “borderland.” Based on this etymology, the “geographical feature” rule we talked about could explain the presence of the definite article in “the Ukraine.” But there’s still some level of uncertainty about Ukraine’s etymology—some people believe it to be just an…

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Ukraine has been in the news a lot lately, but if you’re a bit on the older side, you may remember that it used to be more common to call it “the Ukraine,” with that article in front: the Ukraine.

Have you ever wondered why some countries have “the” in the name and others don’t? Why is it the Philippines but simply Greece? Why is it the Netherlands, but simply India? 

Is it really so simple that we just don’t add the definite article “the” to Greece and India? 

Most countries don’t take a definite article, of course, and it sounds ridiculous when you add one to them: “the France,” “the Greece,” “the India.” It sounds silly!

But there are a handful of countries that do take definite articles, and there are two main patterns.

The Gambia

First,  it seems that many countries whose names derive from important geographical features take a definite article. For example, “the Philippines” refers to the Philippine islands, “the Gambia” refers to the Gambia River,  and “the Netherlands” literally means “the lowlands.” (For comparison, think about  the names of geographical regions, such as “the Amazon” and “the Sahara.”)

Second, we have the United States of America and the United Kingdom, both of which take a definite article because the countries’ names describes their political organization. (This becomes clearer when you consider similar formations in many countries’ official names, such as “the Republic of China” [another name for Taiwan] or “the Russian Federation” or “the United Mexican States.”)

For most countries’ names in English, the presence or lack of a definite article is settled. But with a few countries, there’s still a debate about whether to use “the.”

(The) Ukraine

A handful of countries take definite articles, and there are two main patterns.

And that takes us back to (the) Ukraine. Both “the Ukraine” and “Ukraine” have been used in English, but “Ukraine” alone has been becoming more common, and “Ukraine” alone is AP style, so that is what you will see and hear in most news stories today.

It’s common to hear that the name comes from the word “Ukrayina,” which means “borderland.” Based on this etymology, the “geographical feature” rule we talked about could explain the presence of the definite article in “the Ukraine.” But there’s still some level of uncertainty about Ukraine’s etymology—some people believe it to be just an…

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Grammar Girl is a show designed to make education accessible and entertaining. So today I wanted to share some information about a new podcast with a similar mission. It’s called Science Rules! with Bill Nye. 

You might know Bill Nye as the Science Guy the way you know me as Grammar Girl. On Science Rules, Bill Nye takes calls from listeners and answers all their science questions, whether they’re weird, funny, embarrassing, or serious. 

He’ll answer questions like: What’s going on in your brain when you listen (to a podcast, for example)? Will you ever be able to upload your brain to a computer? Can you harvest energy from all those static-electricity shocks you get in the winter?

The show is co-hosted by science writer and editor Corey S. Powell. You’ll also hear from field experts and celebrity guests like Margaret Cho. 

Tune in to find out how Science Rules everything in the universe. Or click the red audio player above to hear a preview. 

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In honor of Bee Week, today we have an interview with Shalini Shankar, a professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at Northwestern University and the author of “Beeline,” a new book about kids who participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

You can listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above or by finding the podcast on any podcasting app, but if you prefer to read it, we also have a complete (rough) transcript.

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What Is a Participle?

Before we talk about what it means to dangle a participle, we have to answer the question What is a participle?

It’s a tough question because participles have a few different jobs. Today, we’re only going to talk about their job that makes them look like adjectives. They tell you more about the noun that follows.

Participles can be in the present tense or the past tense, and the present participle always ends with “ing.” For example, “dream” is a verb, and “dreaming” is its present participle. “Speed” is a verb, and “speeding” is its present participle. To use the verb, you could say, “He will speed on the freeway.”  “Speed” is an action, a verb.

To use “speeding” as an adjective-like participle, you could say, “Follow that speeding car.” “Speeding” acts something like an adjective modifying the noun “car.” It tells you what the car is doing—what kind of car it is—a speeding car.

Here’s another example: “hike” is a verb, and “hiking” is the present participle. To use the verb, you could say “Let’s hike the trail.” To use the participle, you could say, “Wait for the hiking campers to get back.”  “Hiking,” the participle, tells you what the campers are doing—what kind of campers they are—hiking campers.

Participles have another role too: They help form the perfect and progressive verb tenses, but we won’t talk about those here. (See this article for information on verb tenses.)

What Is a Participial Phrase?

So now I trust that you understand how to use verbs and their participles, but to understand dangling participles, we need to talk about participial phrases. These are just phrases that contain a participle and modify the subject of the sentence.

They can include words besides the participle, such as prepositions, pronouns, and nouns, but for now, we’ll just focus on the idea that they contain a participle like “speeding” or “hiking.” The way they modify the subject isn’t as straightforward as a single adjective modifying a single noun, but the participial phrase is still modifying a noun or noun phrase—the subject.

Here are some examples to help make it more clear:

Floating in the pool, I marveled at the clouds….

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Do you have trouble spelling the word “dilemma”?

I’m nearly certain I was taught the wrong spelling in school, and when I got older and checked a dictionary, I was shocked to find that the word is spelled “dilemma.” Further, the only correct spelling is “dilemma.” I thought it was spelled “dilemna.” It’s not as if “dilemna” is a substandard variant or regional spelling. Dictionaries often note alternative spellings and sometimes even nonstandard spellings, but “dilemna” doesn’t even show up that way.

The wrong spelling (‘dilemna’) shows up in a few books in the Google Book Corpus—not a lot of books—it peaked around 1980 and has fallen since, but it’s in what I can only call “serious publications”: court reports, books that look like they came from academic presses, journal articles, and so on. They are the kinds of things that are probably written by well-educated people, but that also probably didn’t have extensive copy editing.

One of the reasons I was looking through the Google Book Corpus was to try to see if there was a children’s book or English instruction book that had the misspelling—some reason I would have been taught the wrong spelling in school—but I didn’t find anything. From searching the web, I see that other people have also looked for such books and haven’t found them. 

I was talking about this with a friend I went to school with, and she also remembers being shocked when she finally learned the correct spelling of “dilemma” as an adult, and she also insists we were taught the wrong spelling in school. If you start poking around the internet, you’ll see that this is a common story.

The Mandela Effect

If we’re all wrong—and we might be, since I’ve never seen proof that I was taught the wrong spelling and nobody else seems to have come up with evidence either—this could be an example of something called The Mandela Effect. It’s a form of collective misremembering: when many people remember the same thing, but they’re all wrong. The phenomenon gets its name because it was first described in 2010 when many people claimed they remembered seeing Nelson Mandela’s funeral on TV. The problem was that he was actually still alive. He died in 2013. 

How might something like that have happened with the spelling of the word “dilemma”? 

One theory is that it’s easy to think events…

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Around this time of year—as new college graduates are hitting the cold reality of the working world—I start getting questions about how to find work as a writer. How did I get started? What advice can I share?

When I got my undergraduate degree in English, I had no idea how to get a job. None. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, so getting the degree was the big goal for me. Nobody gave me much career counseling, and I didn’t know enough to look for it myself.

I struggled to find a job, and I was really close to having to move back home to live with my parents. I worked in direct sales for a while and then landed a job at an insurance brokerage owned by a friend’s father. They were nice people, and I was incredibly grateful to have a job, and I liked working there, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever.

At the same time, I had a friend who had just graduated with a political science degree and had started working for political groups and writing pieces that were getting placed in newspapers. I was astonished. I mean, I was the writer. I was the one who had written for the school paper in high school and college.

Find a Niche

Pick a niche and look for an opening.

Upon reflection, I decided his biggest advantage was that he had a niche: politics. He had something to write about, and I didn’t. 

It took me many more years and a roundabout path, but I finally ended up with a masters in biology and as much work as I could handle as a science writer and editor. Learning to write about something complicated turned out to be an especially great edge because not many people can understand medicine and biology and write well.

You actually don’t need an advanced degree to become a science writer or, I imagine, a writer in any complicated field, but if you’re just starting out, immersing yourself in a difficult field so you can write about it intelligently and with insight is a path I recommend. You will have less competition, and these tend to be smaller universes, so once you get a little experience, it will be easier to network.

Identify Opportunities That Make You Attractive

When you’re just getting started, you need to look for an opening. For me, a laboratory fire at UC Santa Cruz was my first big break—it got me my first freelance writing assignment for the magazine “The Scientist.” I heard about the fire from a friend on campus, and I immediately cold called the editorial offices at “The Scientist.” Because I already read the magazine, I was…

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A listener named Salomé from Santa Clara, California, wrote, 

“I have a question regarding the word ‘sneaked’ versus ‘snuck.’ I religiously hammer into my students’ heads that ‘snuck’ is not a word, but I hear it used all the time (in public speaking and in the media). My students have even noted the instances and have asked me to explain. [Can you help?]”

Salomé is right that “sneaked” has been considered the proper form of the word for a long time, but she and her students are also on to something when they notice people using “snuck” out in the world.

‘Snuck’ Is Becoming More Popular

The previous edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage put “snuck” for “sneaked” at stage 3 on his language change index (which means it was widespread but still avoided in careful usage), but the most current edition, published in 2016, puts it at stage 4 (which means it’s now ubiquitous but still objected to on cogent grounds by a few die-hard snoots, as he puts it), so as people have been predicting and noticing for a while, “snuck” is becoming more popular, especially in American English. 

‘Snuck’ Is More Popular in the United States

And this is definitely more of an American thing than a British thing. “Snuck” first appeared in American English in the late 1800s, but it wasn’t until about 1970 that it started really gaining popularity in both Britain and the United States. But it’s still used much more often by Americans than the British, which you can see in graphs from the Google Book corpus. 

‘Snuck’ in British English

‘Snuck’ in American English

‘Sneaked’ and ‘Snuck’ on TV

The popularity of “snuck”…

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You may remember my chat with Jane Solomon about a year ago when we talked about how Dictionary.com had started defining emoji. Well, she’s back today to talk about her new children’s book, “The Dictionary of Difficult Words.” 

We talked about the long history of “difficult word” dictionaries in the English language, how she chose the particular difficult words in her book, which letters have the best words, and the specific constraints that dictionary writers often encounter (such as  limited acceptable “defining vocabularies”) and the constraints she put upon herself.

You can listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above or by finding the podcast on any podcasting app, but if you prefer to read it, we also have a complete (rough) transcript.

Image courtesy of Jane Solomon.

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Christians, Jews, and Muslims will all be celebrating religious holidays in the coming weeks, so it seems like a good time to answer questions about religious words.

Do You Capitalize the Word ‘God’?

One of the most common questions people ask about religious words is whether to capitalize the word “god.” The name or title of any specific deity is capitalized just like any other name, so when “God” is used to refer to “the one God” (in other words, in any monotheistic religion), it is capitalized. 

For example, you’d capitalize “God” in these sentences:

• Some Christians give thanks to God before every meal.
• Dear God, please let my team win tonight.

When referring to gods in general, though, or when using the word “god” descriptively, keep it lowercase:

• The Romans believed a god named Jupiter ruled the heavens.
• The Greek gods were always causing trouble for humans.

The same rule holds true for Yahweh, Allah, Zeus, and the names of gods in other religions. They’re capitalized.

Why Do Jewish People Write ‘G-d’?

When ‘God’ is a name, it is capitalized.

An interesting side note about the names of gods is that it’s Jewish tradition to avoid writing the name of God because doing so creates a chance that the name could be treated disrespectfully. For this reason, in Jewish documents, you may see the name written as “G-d.” 

That’s a simplistic explanation of Jewish religious philosophy and rules—it’s not the whole story—but at least now if you see “G-d,” you’ll have an inkling of an idea of why it’s written that way. You can read more about the Jewish tradition here and here.

Do You Capitalize ‘Godly’?

Hillary M. from Las Vegas wanted to know if she should capitalize the word like “godly” and “godsend.”

“Godly” and other words that start with “god” are almost always lowercase. Occasionally, religious publications choose to capitalize words that start with “god,” but a wide variety of style guides I…

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Today’s episode of Grammar Girl is about something special. I’m sharing a preview of a Stitcher Original Podcast called LeVar Burton Reads, hosted by none other than legendary storyteller LeVar Burton.

If you love words and language, there’s a good chance you love a good story. And this show is full of amazing stories you won’t want to miss.

Every week on LeVar Burton Reads, you’ll be engrossed in a piece of beautiful short fiction handpicked by LeVar himself. You’ll hear fantasy and sci-fi, comedy and westerns, and so much more. The featured stories  come from legendary authors like Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ray Bradbury.

Plus, LeVar’s narration is unmatched, and every episode features beautifully immersive soundscapes that completely engross you in the world of the story.

Season 4 just premiered with a full slate of brand-new stories. And you can jump into any episode from Seasons 1, 2, and 3. Just search LeVar Burton Reads in your podcast app and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. But first, click the player above to listen to a preview. 

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National Novel Writing Month is in November, and many people know about the event affectionately known as NaNoWriMo, but fewer people know about the year-round events the organization also sponsors, including Camp NaNoWriMo—a virtual writing camp where you share a “cabin” with a group of other writers who all support each other’s writing goals. Camp NaNoWriMo runs in April and July, and it’s for people who want to write anything, not just a novel.

In this interview, I talked with Grant Faulkner, the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, about how the program got started, the program’s other initiatives, and what advice he has for aspiring novelists given that he’s watched hundreds of thousands of them participate, struggle, and succeed in his programs.

Click the player above to hear the interview, or if you’d prefer to read, we also created a rough transcript.

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