Concrete Nouns vs. Abstract Nouns

All nouns fall into one of two categories: concrete nouns and abstract nouns.

What Is a Concrete Noun?

A concrete noun is a noun that can be identified through one of the five senses (taste, touch, sight, hearing, or smell). Consider the examples below:

Would someone please answer the phone?

In the sentence above, the noun phone is a concrete noun: you can touch it, see it, hear it, and maybe even smell it or taste it.

What is that noise?

Even though noise can’t be touched—and the noise may even be coming from several places—you can hear the noise, so it’s a concrete noun.

After his retirement, Mr. Bond pursued his dream of photographing rainbows.

Rainbows is a concrete noun: they can be seen. Mr. Bond is also a concrete noun, but dream and retirement are not. These nouns are considered abstract nouns. We’ll discuss abstract nouns in more detail below.

What Is an Abstract Noun?

An abstract noun is a noun that cannot be perceived using one of the five senses (i.e., taste, touch, sight, hearing, smelling). Look at the examples below:

We can’t imagine the courage it took to do that.

Courage is an abstract noun because it cannot be seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled.

Below are two more examples of abstract nouns in context.

Early paleontologists assumed that the small brains of some dinosaurs indicated stupidity of the species.

Higher education is strongly recommended.

How much grammar should educators know? Let us know!

What is your opinion of this controversial topic? What role do you think educators play in grammar and writing education?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.

Work Jargon We Wish Would Disappear

Every office has its own sort of language—vocabulary that people frequently use when they’re at work but probably wouldn’t use that often otherwise. We’re used to office jargon, but we’d like to take a minute to review some of the business-y words that do the job while kind of driving us crazy at the same time. Jargon varies from office to office, but here are five of the words and phrases that make us cringe.

Goal-oriented: At work, it’s important to be goal-oriented. After all, if you aren’t working toward a goal, how the heck are you spending your time? But there is one issue with this term: it has become meaningless in its overuse. After seeing this term on multiple resumés and in countless slideshows, we think it’s time to find a new word.

Optimize: To optimize means to make the best or most effective use of—to improve efficiency. The way some people speak at work, it seems like nearly everything can be optimized, from workflows to team structures to refrigerator organization. If you can think of a relationship or process in your office, you can probably optimize it. Optimization is great—who doesn’t love efficiency?—but the term can become annoying. Optimize your vocabulary by cutting back on your use of this term.

Synergy: The definition of synergy is “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.” But when people use the term synergy in the office, it seems to imply something mystical, almost magical, about working together. We would prefer to keep things simple and more concrete by using terms like “cooperation” or “collaboration” to describe the process of working together.

Impact (used as a verb): While impact is often used as a verb (meaning to affect or influence something), this word is so overused and misused that we vote for stopping its usage completely. People want to “impact sales,” “impact the community,” and even “impact the future.” Make an impact in your office by using other synonyms instead of impact.

Disrupt: This word has gained popularity in the startup and technology world, but its use has started to become a bit—ahem—disruptive. Most people use the term to mean something akin to “upsetting the old balance of power” or “bucking expectations and completely changing the way things are done.” There’s even a conference, Techcrunch Disrupt, which underscores the use and importance of the word. Do you know what would be truly disruptive? Finding a new term to describe this action.

Which work-related words or jargon drives you crazy? What are your preferred replacements? Share your pet peeves in the comments!

Navigating Email Etiquette at Work

Even though email takes up well over a quarter of the average working person’s day, many people still don’t have a knack for email etiquette. Often, the issue lies in separating personal email preferences from professional communication policies. Follow these tips for maintaining email etiquette at work, and you’ll develop a more effective communication strategy in no time.

Use a Clear Subject Line

The subject line of your email is your first and only chance to make a good impression on your recipient. When you draw your subject out into a rambling prologue, you’ll give the recipient the sense that your message is similarly lengthy and poorly structured. When you opt for short, single word subject lines, however, you run the risk of being too vague and not offering enough information.

In a professional setting, it’s best to keep your subject lines clear and concise. Tell your recipients what they can expect to read in your email without crossing the line into needless detail or flowery language.

CC or BCC for Organization and Confidentiality

Carbon copy (CC) and blind carbon copy (BCC) features offer helpful options for keeping your emails organized and confidential. Though you often carry on email-based conversations with a few key coworkers, you may find that you need to bring other colleagues into the picture, too. Opt for CC when including a colleague on an email for informational purposes only, with no expectation of a reply.

Since a BCC essentially makes its recipient’s email address invisible to everyone except the sender and the BCC recipient, this feature is best used for confidentiality purposes. When you need to include a colleague or a client in a conversation without alerting the other “To” recipients, opt for BCC. This feature is also helpful when emailing a list of business contacts whose email addresses must remain confidential.

Reply as Quickly as Possible

Have you ever read an email and set it aside, only to reply a week or more later? Always reply to emails as quickly as you can, and never make your recipient wait for a reply for more than 48 hours. Remember that time is money, so when you delay your replies, you’re only costing yourself and your recipient.

Choose Appropriate Language

As a general rule, your professional emails should not read the same way that your personal ones do. In professional emails, avoid trendy language, overly casual phrases, and emoticons.

Don’t take it so far, however, that your messages come across as stuffy or too lofty. Also, when you choose your wording, consider your office culture. If your coworkers keep things casual, you can probably feel free to tone down your overly professional email.

Choose an Appropriate Signoff

Email users and experts eternally debate about the best words and phrases to use when closing an email. A friendly “cheers” may work in personal emails, but it comes across as too casual in most professional settings. Signing off with a simple “thanks” may work in many situations, but it’s not suitable when your message doesn’t actually suggest gratitude. Make sure your signoff fits the occasion, given your message and your audience.

Call When Necessary

Sometimes email just isn’t the right mode of communication, and it’s best to tackle the business at hand with a phone call or an in-person meeting instead. When your communication gets too complex or personal, eliminating email may be helpful.

This rule of thumb is particularly true when issues with coworkers arise. Since miscommunication can happen with email despite your best efforts, know when to take your conversations offline.

Maintaining email etiquette at work can mean the difference between miscommunicating and getting the job done efficiently. What’s your email pet peeve?”

Should I Use Will or Would in an If-Clause?

Many writers wonder if it’s equally correct to use “will” or “would” in an if-clause. The short answer is no, but there are exceptions to the rule. An if- or when-clause (often used to form conditional sentences) generally does not contain “will,” which is the simple future tense of the verb “to be.” One exception is when the action in the if- or when-clause takes place after that in the main clause. For example, consider the following sentence:

If aspirin will ease my headache, I will take a couple tonight instead of this horrible medicine.

The action in this sentence is the aspirin easing the headache, which will take place only after the speaker takes them later that night.

Another exception is when “will” is not being used as an auxiliary verb, but as a modal verb. In other words, “will” is permitted when it is being used to politely express willingness, persistence or a wish. For example, consider the following sentence:

I think I will warm some water for tea if you will excuse me.

The speaker will only warm up the water if he is excused by the listener.

Grammar Basics: What Is Objective Case?

An direct object is a noun or noun phrase that receives the action of a transitive verb. For example:

Alice caught the baseball.

Subject=Alice Verb=caught Object=baseball

A direct object answers the question of who(m) or what. In the sentence above, you could determine that ‘baseball’ is a direct object by asking the question: What did Alice catch? She caught the baseball. Baseball is the direct object. An indirect object answers the question of to whom, for whom, or for what. For example:

Max pitched Alice the baseball.

Max (subject) pitched (verb) the baseball (direct object) to whom? He pitched it to Alice. Alice is the indirect object. To learn more about grammar and to help us celebrate National Grammar Day this March, visit our new resource page.

Are Pun Competitions a Real Thing?

Around 400 people gathered on Sunday, November 6, at a Kuala Lumpur coffee shop called The Bee. Inside, there was barely enough room to stand, but that didn’t stop people from having fun and enjoying what they’d all come to witness—Malaysia’s very first pun competition. Adequately titled Pun Competition Malaysia, the event was a massive success, and by the end of it, Malaysia had its first winner of “The Punniest Ever” title, a guy called Zim Ahmadi.

Punning (also called paronomasia), is a type of wordplay that feeds on words with multiple meanings, or different words that sound similar. When you say that the cannibals didn’t eat the clown because the clown tasted funny, the joke relies on the fact that “funny” has two meanings. When you say that Bilbo Baggins started walking without his shoes and it turned into a hobbit, you’re using the fact that the words “hobbit” and “habit” sound alike, and that Bilbo is, in fact, a hobbit.

Puns have had a way of coming in and out of fashion throughout history. They were popular at the time Jesus lived, as the Bible has us believe (Matthew 16:18, anyone?). Cicero was a prominent punster, and a very funny member of Roman society. Shakespeare wasn’t afraid of using a pun now and then, and the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, wrote a guide to punning. Swift’s guide came at a time when puns were being attacked by people such as the English essayist Joseph Addison and the English godfather of lexicography, Samuel Johnson, among others. Even though we’re well past the eighteenth century and the great punning uproar of that time, puns are still met with cringes. Or so it seems.

The very first Malaysian Pun Competition is interesting not because it’s an isolated event—it’s not—but because it shows that love of punning is a real thing. The O. Henry Pun-Off has seen people doing their best punning every May since 1978. But newer torch-carriers have been popping up left and right. PUNDERDROME is a Brooklyn-based punning competition that’s been running since 2011. Pundamonium is a pun-slam competition that’s been held around the United States since 2013. The UK Pun Championship celebrated its fourth birthday this year.

So yes, pun competitions are a real thing. People actually turn up and enjoy listening to puns and have a good time. This shouldn’t come as a surprise though—the stigma against punning has been heavily challenged by the likes of late-night talk show hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, the creator of BoJack Horseman Raphael Bob-Waksberg, and the legions of people who have contributed to making Tumblr the best place on the Internet for hilarious punning. Bad puns are still bad, just like bad jokes are, but good puns will make people watch a TV show, check out a website, or come to an event to share a laugh with other punthusiasts.