Roy Blount Jr. has written the funniest usage book I've ever read.

Today's quiz was inspired and aided by John Bremner's "Words on Words." The five sentences on the quiz involve word choices. Some sentences appeared in print; others were composed to illustrate the point.

Click here or on the question mark icon to begin.

Speeches in this year's presidential campaign are awash in a rhetorical device called antimetabole, according to an article in Slate.

In this device, the speaker repeats words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order, as in President Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

I learned about the Slate piece in an "On the Media" segment, which linked to this definition. Slate cited a Wikipedia article about antimetabole, which explains the word's Greek origin. Follow the links above for more examples, and click here for a pronouncing guide.

The word "anonymize" came up in a radio interview, and that leads to a look into the formation of new words.

Today's quiz contains various grammar, usage, punctuation or spelling problems. Try the quiz and leave a comment if you wish. I've put no time limit on the quiz, which has the usual five parts. 

See my earlier post for a review of a book that plays a part in one of the quiz answers today.

Click here or on the question mark icon to begin.

A writing and grammar teacher has written a useful book on the most common errors in English grammar and usage.

The Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) received some attention in the news media and from the justice system recently. Two members of TEAL, which makes a crusade of correcting errors on public signage, have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic sign at the Grand Canyon. Read a news story about it here.

I heard about this incident from Friday night's "Worst Person" segment on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." If you can stomach Olbermann's liberal bent, click on the embedded video below.

This sentence led a reader to call us last week:

Since she quit her job in March, her goal has been to continue growing the business.

As I indicated with italics, the offending phrase was "growing the business." The reader, who was quite animated, wanted us to stop using this bit of business jargon. In her mind, you can grow flowers and you can grow a beard, but you cannot grow a business.

Two advertisements caught our eyes this week. They have apostrophe problems, but different ones. The first, pictured below, falls into the old trap of using an apostrophe to make a plural. The shopping center mentioned in this ad, which came as a direct mail flier, is Clayton Corners (multiple corners).

The second ad appeared on television. It has a more unusual apostrophe problem, as you can see below. We use apostrophes to make nouns possessive, a vestige of a time when English was a more inflected language, when words changed form to indicate their function in a sentence. Pronouns still change form when they are used in the possessive case, but nouns merely take 's or ' . I wonder if the ad writers feared the apostrophe. Or maybe the apostrophe was just omitted inadvertently.

At the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm, I am going to repeat something that we learned early in elementary school.

Here are the simplified rules for making a common noun possessive.

• For singular nouns, add 's. man's friend, girl's dress.
• For plural nouns ending in s, add ' (apostrophe only). boys' game, dogs' leashes.
• For plural nouns not ending in s, add 's. men's friend, children's games.

There are, of course, variations on the rules, but these rules will carry us through most cases.

Update: A commenter questioned whether the shopping center mentioned in the first ad was indeed Clayton Corners. It is. Below is a photo of the shopping center's sign.

Should that be "who" or "whom"?