The Motion Picture Association of America rates movies to provide viewers with advance information about the content of films.  If asked to rate this blog, I would say it is “not politically correct.”  Having been reared in a small town in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri during World War II and immediately following, I firmly believe there are some things we need to be reminded of as we prepare for Thanksgiving 2014, even if it means being politically incorrect.  Bear with me for four paragraphs, and you will see what I mean. Read more…

The other morning I went to a Starbucks I am well acquainted with and know the flow of customer traffic.  I went at a time when there would be a really good cross section of people: high school and college students, young adults, and older people.  I concentrated at first on high school students; I knew they were just killing a few minutes before hurrying on to school. 

I went from table to table, sitting down in a chair, and saying to the somewhat surprised students sitting around the table, “I’m William Bradshaw.  I’m a writer working on an article, and I need your help.  Would you mind answering a few questions?”  The responses were always in the affirmative. Read more…

Last week, my wife and I went to our favorite pizza place.  When we were finished eating, the waiter brought us the check.  I didn’t have the correct change.  So I quickly figured the tip in my head, gave him two larger bills, and said to him, “Just bring me back five dollars, and I’ll be happy.”  He replied, “Okay, I’ll bring you back five bucks.” 

His referring to five dollars as five “bucks” caught my attention.  When growing up in southern Missouri, “bucks” was a very common term used for “dollars,” but having lived in the St. Louis area for the last twenty years, it had been some time since I had heard “bucks” used in this way. 

This caused me to wonder how bucks came about to mean dollars and, for that matter, what about other terms often used to refer to money such as “grand,” “dough,” “lettuce,” “bacon,” “sawbuck,” “scratch,” and “stash,” to mention a few.  So for the third week in a row I am writing about money. Read more…

Would you like to get along better with your husband or wife, or with you children, especially your teenager?  Or, if you are a teenager, would you like getting along better with your parents or with a teacher in high school or college.  Or, if you are a teacher, are you making mistakes that lead students to feel put upon?  Or, at work, do you want to get along better with your boss, or do higher-ups in the company want to get along better with the people working under their supervision?  And on the list goes: let your imagination complete the list for you. 

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you need to know about a very common error in grammar that so many of us make when we are talking with others—a very simple error that is easy to correct.  I am talking about whether to use “to” or “with.” Read more…

Daylight saving time has started this weekend, as we turned out clocks forward one hour, resulting in giving us more daylight at the end of the day.?

My grandmother was a music teacher.? She always kept two clocks on her piano.? She was a religious woman and said one of the clocks was set to God’s time and the other to man’s time.? The one set on standard time she called God’s time, and the one on daylight saving time she called man’s time.? The family always joked about it, but it was no joking matter to her.? The two clocks remained on her piano year around.

Most authorities agree that the world is divided into twenty-four times zones.? Prior to the advent of railroads there was no reason for time zones to be standardized, and countries and cities had their own ways of determining what time it was.? But with the advent of a single mode of uninterrupted travel, Read more…

A good friend of mine asked me the other day if it was correct to say, “taken back” as an expression of surprise. The answer is “no”; the correct phase is “taken aback.” That may sound funny to some people, but it is correct.

This caused me to think about another word and some prefixes. So I decided to write about “aback,” “unkempt,” and how to use “in” or “im” or “il” or “ir” as a prefix with adjectives. Let’s take them one by one.

Misunderstood Words: “Aback” and “Unkempt”

“Aback,” an adverb, dating from AD 1,100 and coming to us from Middle English, has three historic definitions: Read more…