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An alleged burglar is someone who has been accused of being a burglar but whose innocence or guilt has yet to be established. An alleged incident is an event that is said to have taken place but has not yet been verified. In their zeal to protect the rights of the accused, newspapers and law [...]
Be careful with sentences that have an all … not … form. They may be hazardous to your clarity. The sentence All of the departments did not file a report may mean that some departments did not file or that none did. If you want the first meaning, you can express it unambiguously by saying [...]
The construction all that is used informally in questions and negative sentences to mean “to the degree expected,” as in I know it won an Oscar, but the film is not all that exciting. In an earlier survey, the Usage Panel rejected the use of this construction in formal writing.
You may be glad you have an alibi if you’re hauled into court, but you may not want one if you’re merely called on the carpet. When used as a noun in its nonlegal sense of “an excuse,” alibi splits the Usage Panel in half. Forty-nine percent accept it in the sentence He always had [...]
Aggravate need not be an aggravating word. It comes from the Latin verb aggravare, which has two meanings: “to make heavier,” that is, “to add to the weight of,” and “to annoy,” “oppress,” “burden.” When some people nowadays claim that aggravate should mean only “to make worse” and not “to irritate,” they ignore not only [...]
It is true that Cicero would have used agendum to refer to a single item of business before the Roman Senate, with agenda as its plural. But in Modern English agenda is used as a singular noun to denote the set or list of such items, as in The agenda for the meeting has not [...]
The expressions in the affirmative and in the negative are thought to come from military aviation, where pilots use affirmative and negative as synonyms for yes and no in radio transmissions. The idea is that the longer words are less likely to get lost in static. But when used in ordinary contexts, such as She [...]
If there is an affinity between two friends, does one then have an affinity for the other? Affinity has a variety of meanings, ranging from “relationship by marriage” (its earliest) to “a resemblance or similarity” and extending to “a natural attraction” and even “a chemical attraction.” The meanings are clear enough, but it’s not always [...]
Affect and effect are sometimes confused, but before you can sort them out, you must sort out the two words spelled affect. One means “to put on a false show of,” as in She affected a British accent. The other can be both a noun and a verb. The noun meaning “emotion” is a technical [...]
The use of advise in the sense of “inform, notify” was found acceptable by a majority of the Usage Panel in an earlier survey, but many members prefer that this usage be restricted to business correspondence and legal contexts. Thus a sentence like The suspects were advised of their rights is perfectly acceptable, but one [...]