@grammargirl I don't keep up with style guides so your post made me second guess my gut. My brain says that the word most likely to follow "uppercase" is "characters" (I read Python all day long). So I checked the stats in English books and the rank order is:

1. ... letters
2. ... characters
3. ... words
4. ... titles
5. ... names
(singular nouns rank the same, right after each plural noun)

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=uppercase+letter,uppercase+letters,uppercase+character,uppercase+word,uppercase+words,uppercase+titles,uppercase+names&year_start=1920&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

#ComputationalLinguistics #NLP #WordUsage #Statistics #English

@Jake_Vig @ApproachingSteed

Who arrested Ray Parker Jr.? The grammar police?

Judge: “Mr. Parker, do you understand you’ve been charged with 2 counts of negative #WordUsage in a single sentence? How do you plea?”

Mr. Parker: “I ain’t never been guilty.”

Judge: “Let the record show Mr. Parker has plead guilty to *two* 2 counts of negative word usage in a single sentence. Does ghostbusting still make you feel good, sir?”

- #steeds

#Ghostbusters #MusicPositive

https://youtu.be/Fe93CLbHjxQ

Whatever happened to the word "abolition"?
#WordUsage

@adam_y Hmmm, deviously clever. I'd have to find a cleaver. Which finger? It's a shot in the dark like this ozzy song.

#Music #MusicPositive #Ozzy #WordUsage #MetalMusic #RockMusic
https://youtu.be/Mzyz2egx_0c

Do you say “on line” or “in line” (as in, #GeorgiaVoters had to wait on line way too long to vote last Saturday)?

I grew up in NYC, where I had to regularly wait on line for buses, movies, art exhibits, etc. But I noticed that gmail keeps correcting my usage of on (e.g., copied on this email), telling me to use “in”. It sounds wrong! Is that just because of my regional preference for on line?
#grammar #WordUsage