ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

how abt:
Giving feedback to a subordinate helps him learn (her learn). [and then alternate the order]

Grammatically incorrect but increasingly tolerated in my experience. In the version of business English our business uses here in England, no-one would even notice. Except the sort of pedants you'd like to irritate.

Giving feedback to subordinateS helps them learn.

Dilemma solved.

either or'sgood with me

men can eat a bag of dicks

i live for the day i see this in any corporate communication

no, them is acceptable these days, and has been for years

things belonging to Cousin It are Cousin It's

That's what people kept telling me, but I was never that adventurous.

It used to be gramatically acceptable to use a masculine pronoun (he, him, etc.) when referring to a person of unspecified gender (you know what I mean.. I can't think of any other way to put it), but now the "he or she"/"his or her" method is the proper form.

I'm not sure if it makes a difference whether you use a slash or the word "or." I suspect that the slash is unacceptable in formal writing.

Unless it's academic writing, and it allows you to make a terrible pun somehow.

Proper, maybe. But it should be pointed out that if you're having to cram this into your sentence, you;re writing a clumsy sentence, and you should probably drop back and punt.

hyphens
Our style is to use one word wherever possible, including some instances where a word might be hyphenated by other publications. Hyphens tend to clutter up text (particularly when the computer breaks already hyphenated words at the end of lines)

Inventions, ideas and new concepts often begin life as two words, then become hyphenated, before finally becoming accepted as one word. Why wait? "Wire-less" and "down-stairs" were once hyphenated. In pursuit of this it is preferable to go further than Collins does in many cases: eg trenchcoat is two words in Collins but one under our style

Never use hyphens after adverbs, eg politically naive, wholly owned. But do use them to form compound adjectives, eg two-tonne vessel, three-year deal

Do use hyphens where not using one would be ambiguous, eg to distinguish "black-cab drivers come under attack" from "black cab-drivers come under attack"

Tracer, I read this as advocating the phrase "fact-checking" as a verb (sorry, should have made that clear) so thanks were in order!

assuming i only have one brother, would it be acceptable to write, "I went with my brother Isaac to the store" or do i have to write, "I went with my brother, Isaac, to the store" ?

for some reason i am under the impression that non-essential info can be stuck in without commas as long as it is only one or two words. but apparently, this is wrong?

have you any wool?

What matter have you against me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxO0jo7U4d4

british people don't consider "gotten" a word iirc

That’s changed a lot recently.

You could say they’ve gotten wise to the hip US lingo

ill-gotten is very ordinary present-day uk english (when used of gains, riches, wealth etc)

etymonline.com dates its hip modernity to the 14c: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gotten

(ie like many US variants it's older not newer)

Best word there is sooterkin.

it is a good word definitely

I was making a bad joke fwiw

I'm not at all keen on 'gotten'. But for that matter I'm not keen on 'got' - a very overused, almost ubiquitous word which I don't find at all pretty. As Mark S has already indicated above, it's often not at all necessary to use this word. In James Redd's example, I would say 'Have you reached ... ?'

be careful or you will get got

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Meo9VQKhN-Q

So my state has outlawed individual plastic bags, which means you have to bring your own shopping bags to the supermarket and basically everywhere else to carry your purchases away. I went to a small supermarket the other day on a whim and didn't have a bag with me, so I was forced to buy one for 99 cents. Anyway, it says on the side

"Thank You for Shopping With us!"

capitalized exactly like that. Shouldn't that obviously be "Thank You for Shopping with Us!"?

Maybe they thought it was a two-letter word and therefore should be capitalized? Or maybe it is some weird patriotic thing.

I used to use a free bag somebody gave me from the NYC DoS or some other agency, but I finally lost it and ending up getting a nice foldable one from the local gift shop that wasn't too expensive which I love, although now I am paranoid since I don't have it on me and don't quite remember where I put it.

Should be lowercased, I meant to say.

All lowercase and all caps both solutions to a certain problem.

CamelCase to thread!

all lowercase is always correct

also check yrself once you start proofing plastic bags, there's a lot of vernacular house style out there and you will lose yr mind to no purpose

all lowercase is always correct

thats right

Shouldn't that obviously be "Thank You for Shopping with Us!"?

Personally speaking, I'd lose the exclamation point as making them sound over-excitable and perhaps mentally unbalanced.

Should really be: “Thank You for Shopping with ‘us!’”

Thank You for Shopping with BIG HOOS aka the streendriver

Songs where it’s fun to say HOOS in place of the actual plastic bag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFv53VolRj8

Perhaps I will start posting in HOOS case.

DO U see?!

LET ME TRY this on for size.

TS: ALL OF A SUDDEN VS. all of the sudden

Can I use "occasioned" like this?

the publication of X occasioned the first use of some new word

Note that the new word doesn't appear in X itself but appears in a review of X.

It's grammatical enough, and "occasioned" is certainly an accepted word, so I'd say 'yes' to your question.

this usage is uncontroversially fine: if i was bored or being testy as an acitivist sub editor i might switch in "saw" or "led to" depending on context (context = nature of nearby sentences acc my picky sub self lol) viz "the publication of X saw the first use of some new word"/"the publication of X led to the first use of some new word"

gloss: if "occasioned" maybe possibly presents a micro-speedbump for a reader, i think "saw" presents none, while "led to" perhaps implies the fact you note, that the new word arrives a little later than X…

you might also use "prompted"

but your sentence is fine as is imo

Yeah, I think "occasioned" there is a little overwritten and that with a little bit of effort "led to" would be much more readable.

saw (a young person) referred to as a 'third-generation holocaust survivor'

obviously the topic is fraught, but it seems like there should be a better way to describe someone whose grandparents survived the camps

A completely uncontroversial way to say that would be "a grandchild of Holocaust survivors."

And while - as mòokieproof says - it is fraught, it does seem a bit much to imply that you "survived" an event that you did not personally experience.

I am not, personally, a survivor of the Visigothic Sack of Rome, the Protestant Reformation, the Irish Potato Famine, the Trail of Tears, the American Revolution, the Civil War, or school desegregation.

Maybe (stretching this quite a bit) I have experienced some personal effects from the Cold War and/or the Vietnam War due to my parents' participation in them, but calling myself a "survivor" seems more like stolen valor than empathy and solidarity.