Miscellaneous Entries.
wastewater. One word.
way(s). In the sense “the length of a course or distance,” “way” is the standard term {a long way}. “Ways” is dialectal. So it’s surprising to find “ways” in serious journalism — e.g.: “This is premature, of course; Fox still has a ways to go [read ‘some way to go’?] before it’s a full-fledged network.” Larry Reibstein & Nancy Hass, “Rupert’s Power Play,” Newsweek, 6 June 1994, at 46. Language-Change Index — “a ways to go”: Stage 2.
webpage. One word — e.g.: “When you click your mouse on a marked link on a webpage, here’s what happens.” H. Eric Branscomb, Casting Your Net 66 (2000).
website. One word, lowercase. But some stylesheets and dictionaries specify *”Web site” (a clunker). When “Web” stands alone, it is capitalized.
we’d = (1) we would; or (2) we had. Sense 2 has not held as much favor as sense 1, but it is common and typically doesn’t cause any confusion because the past participle follows closely — e.g.: “We’d just arrived in Colorado . . . . We’d gone to sleep gliding through the farmlands of Missouri.” Sue Wunder, “Perfect, Thanks to Mulligan,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 Aug. 1997, at 16.
Wedgwood. So spelled — not *”Wedgewood.”
*Invariably inferior form.
For information about the Language-Change Index click here.
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Quotation of the Day: “Poor writers are invariably pleased with their own work. Good writers are hard on themselves. The ability to discover for oneself what has gone wrong with a sentence, a paragraph, or the organization of an essay is indispensable to success.” Kenneth S. Rothwell, Questions of Rhetoric and Usage 6 (1971).
