Looking to “Get Lucky” this Saint Patrick’s Day? These Idioms May Help

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day! Walk into any department or grocery store at this time of year, and you may find yourself surrounded by leprechaun hats, green shirts, rainbow banners, shamrock-shaped candy, and other Irish-themed paraphernalia. Embedded in these symbols of Irish tradition is the idea of luck (good, bad, and uncertain) and the language associated with luck.

With that, here are some luck-related idioms commonly used in the English language:

To hit the jackpot

• Meaning: to achieve sudden or sensational success.
• Example: The hungry wolf thought he had hit the jackpot when he discovered a herd of sleeping sheep.

Goldmine

• Meaning: a source of something desirable (e.g., wealth, information).
• Example: Facebook and Twitter provide a goldmine of personal status updates.

Silver lining

• Meaning: a consoling aspect of a difficult situation.
• Example: The silver lining to losing my phone is that I no longer have to answer when my boss calls.

Saving grace

• Meaning: a redeeming feature that compensates for other negative qualities.
• Example: Senior discounts are the saving grace of old age.

To luck out

• Meaning: to be fortunate.
• Example: I lucked out in my art history class by having a photographic memory and consistent study habits. 

To thank one’s lucky stars

• Meaning: to feel grateful for avoiding a bad situation.
• Example: I thank my lucky stars that I bought an umbrella right before the thunderstorm.

To look a gift horse in the mouth

• Meaning: to be ungrateful for a favor.
• Example: When I complained about the size of my weekly allowance, my dad told me that I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

To count your chickens before they hatch

• Meaning: to rely on a desirable result before it happens.
• Example: You may have a large salary soon, but don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

Knock on wood

• Meaning: a phrase that expresses the hope that (1) something desirable will happen or continue to happen, or (2) something undesirable will not happen.
• Examples:

(1)  I have done well on my math tests this year. Knock on wood!

(2)  Nobody in my family has had the flu this year. Knock on wood!

Fat chance

• Meaning: little or no possibility of success.
• Example: John hates exercise—a fat chance he has of winning the swim competition!

That ship has sailed

• Meaning: the opportunity has passed.
• Example: I wanted to be a famous child actor, but when I turned thirty and had not starred in any movies, I realized that that ship had sailed.

Rough patch

• Meaning: a difficult situation or period.
• Example: Jim is going through a rough patch right now because he lost his job and his girlfriend dumped him.

Appositives—What They Are and How to Use Them

An appositive noun or noun phrase follows another noun or noun phrase in apposition to it; that is, it provides information that further identifies or defines it. Such “bonus facts” are framed by commas unless the appositive is restrictive (i.e., provides essential information about the noun).

Appose is a very old word that one doesn’t cross paths with much except in the realms of grammar and science. It came to English from Middle French via Latin, and means “to put near, side by side, or alongside.” It doesn’t quite mean the same as oppose, but it is quite close in meaning to juxtapose. Apposition is used in medical science to describe how cell walls defend themselves by thickening themselves with layers of protection. In grammar, an element is said to be placed in apposition to another element if it provides an extra layer of description to it.

What Is an Appositive?

At its heart, an appositive is bonus information.

Hermione Granger, a witch at Hogwarts School, is accomplished at spells.

The core of this sentence is Hermione Granger is accomplished at spells. A witch at Hogwarts School is an appositive noun phrase that gives us additional information about Hermione Granger.

The Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel’s masterpiece, can be found on the Champs de Mars.

This is a sentence about where the Eiffel Tower can be found. The appositive phrase Gustave Eiffel’s masterpiece tells us a bit more about the sentence’s subject noun, Eiffel Tower.

My childhood friend, Anne-Marie, loved horses.

Here, the core sentence is My childhood friend loved horses. It works as a sentence on its own, but the appositive, the proper noun Anne-Marie, gives the reader supplemental information about my friend. It renames her.

Commas and Appositives

Appositive nouns and noun phrases are often nonrestrictive; that is, they can be omitted from a sentence without obscuring the identity of the nouns they describe. Another word for nonrestrictive is nonessential. Always bookend a nonrestrictive, appositive noun or phrase with commas in the middle of a sentence. If the noun or phrase is placed at the end of a sentence, it should be preceded by a comma.

Use Commas to Frame Nonrestrictive Elements

Frédéric Chopin a Polish composer was one of the most celebrated virtuoso pianists of his day.

Frédéric Chopin, a Polish composer, was one of the most celebrated virtuoso pianists of his day.

My brother often likens himself to Zeus the god of thunder.

My brother often likens himself to Zeus, the god of thunder.

Depending on the tone you want to achieve and the context, you may also choose either parentheses or brackets to frame a nonrestrictive appositive phrase.

My brother often likens himself to Zeus (the god of thunder).

My brother often likens himself to Zeus—the god of thunder.

Whichever way you choose to punctuate it, the key is to realize that My brother likens himself to Zeus is the core sentence and that the god of thunder is nonessential to that sentence. It is nice to know, but it is not essential in terms of function.

Think of a sentence with a nonrestrictive appositive in it as a motorcycle with a sidecar attached to it. The sidecar is a lovely addition to the motorcycle and changes the overall experience of taking it for a spin, but the motorcycle could go on without it. The nonrestrictive appositive is your sidecar, and it needs punctuation to attach it to the motorcycle, which is your sentence.

Commas and Restrictive Elements Don’t Mix

When an appositive noun or noun phrase contains an essential element without which a sentence’s meaning would materially alter, do not frame it with commas.

My friend, Bill, owes me fifty dollars.

My friend Bill owes me fifty dollars.

There are no commas here because Bill is an essential description of my friend. We can assume from this sentence that the speaker has many friends, but the one who owes him or her money is Bill. The unlikely circumstance under which the first sentence could be construed as correct would be if the speaker has only one confirmed friend, and that friend’s name is Bill.

Now think of a motorcycle again, except now without the sidecar. This is the restrictive appositive motorcycle. If anyone wants to hitch a ride on this motorcycle, he or she will have to ride double behind the driver. With this type of appositive, there is no disconnection between the driver and the passenger; one has his or her arms around the other. The restrictive appositive motorcycle zooms out of sight—without commas.

Celebrities on Twitter: Who makes more mistakes?

Grammarly recently compiled a list of the 25 most recent tweets from each of the top 150+ celebrities on Twitter, based on number of followers. Our team of proofreaders then corrected these tweets for spelling and grammar errors. Here’s a general overview of what we found:

• Female celebrities make fewer overall writing errors (11.1 mistakes per 100 words) than male celebrities (13.0 mistakes per 100 words) on Twitter
• Musicians are the worst writers in any category of celebrity, including politician, actor, athlete, and business leader, with an average of 14.5 mistakes per 100 words.
• Unsurprisingly, writers are the most accurate writers among all celebrities, with an average of 6.9 mistakes per 100 words
• The accuracy of a celebrity’s grammar correlates directly with that person’s age — younger celebrities make more grammar mistakes than older celebrities
• Celebrities who are older than 40 years old make more spelling mistakes (5.5 mistakes per 100 words) than celebrities who are younger than 40 years old (2.7 mistakes per 100 words)

We’ve summarized our findings using this handy infographic:

Female celebrities make fewer overall writing errors, musicians are the worst writers in any category of celebrity…

To embed it into a blog post, paste the following HTML snippet into your web editor:

8 Weird Techniques to Beat Writer’s Block

You’ve already taken ten deep breaths, made coffee, gone on a walk, had a snooze, made more coffee, looked at colossal lists of inspiring ideas, and made another cup of coffee for good measure. It’s time to break out the big guns—er, pens.

Everyone has their way to push through mental blocks and get things done . . . but what are the weirdest strategies? Here are eight odd but useful ways to reset your brain.

1 Shake up your routine.

Write at a different time. Go to a new coffee shop, or sit in the park. Go to a movie in the middle of the day. If you usually write on a computer, try pencils. Or colored pencils!

2 Use your five senses.

Listen to weird music. (Try these Kurdish disco beats. Or this Russian waltz). Go to a bakery and inhale—or if you’re feeling adventurous, stick your head in the dumpster out behind the grocery store. Put your hands on a pineapple. Eat it—or eat a squid tentacle. Watch a movie or TV show you haven’t seen, or better yet, go sit somewhere new and watch the people who go by. Really watch, and make up their stories as you do.

3 Cry your heart out.

On paper, that is. And preferably with words, not tears.

Write down all the things you don’t like about your writing. List the problems with the piece you’re working on. Scribble down what you don’t like about when you can’t write. Tally all your fears, dislikes, complaints, and concerns. Basically, this is your permission to have an uninterrupted gripe fest on paper until you run out of complaints.

The trick: you will run out of complaints. Once you express all that negativity, you’ll find it seeping away. It may not solve your writer’s block completely, but it should make you feel a bit better about picking up the pen (or keyboard) moving forward.

4 Do something you haven’t done since you were a kid.

Grab a jump rope and get the blood flowing. Go to the park and kick a kid off the swings (actually, leave the kids alone. But swinging is fun).

Or do something you’ve never done that kids do: play paintball, or laser tag, do a funny dance, or, if you can recruit some teammates, kickball or capture the flag. Okay, fine—videogames count, but don’t get sucked in. Sporty games are best because the resulting endorphin boost can get you in a better writing mood, but picking an unusual activity of any kind can help your imagination move into spaces you wouldn’t have expected.

5 Start a conversation with a stranger.

If it’s interesting and you can use it as writing fuel, awesome! You win.

If it isn’t, write five ways it could have gone differently. What could you have said to veer the conversation in a certain direction? What if you’d become besties? What if you secretly shared a long-lost uncle? What if you became a duo of crime-fighting, demon-slaying superheroes?

6 Get an imaginary friend.

No stranger handy? No problem.

Create an imaginary person to talk to who loves everything you ever write. If you’re a creative type, you can give your new buddy a name, personality, even pick a photo or a doodle that looks like the person (or llama, or dinosaur) you want to talk to.

If that’s taking it a bit too far, you can still play the imagination game with a nameless invisible buddy. Write out a conversation, or scribble a letter to your friend. If you’re not ready to let them know about your writing issues, invent some challenges for your friend and talk those out. It’s an exercise that will get you out of your negative, blocked headspace, and if your friend is a true fan, it can help you see the good in your writing and move past the blockage.

And don’t worry: being a grown-up with an imaginary friend doesn’t make you crazy. If you start liking your friend more than everyone else around you, then we’ll talk.

7 Create a reward system for yourself, and break it.

Write for thirty minutes (or two pages, or 500 words—set your milestone) and give yourself a prize. Gummy bears. Coffee. Your favorite game app.

Already have a reward system and still have writer’s block? Binge on rewards. Have two ice cream sundaes, or play your Scrabble app for two hours straight. After that, you’ll probably be dying to do something productive.

8 Say hey to the cliché.

If you’re not in the mood to dance around to Kurdish music like a maniac or talk to your invisible bestie like—well, a maniac, go back to the tried-and-true methods of fighting writer’s block. Take a break, or a nap. Make lists of inspiring ideas. Read lists of inspiring ideas. Freewrite until a good idea comes along. Stare at a wall (or preferably, nature). And there’s always coffee.

There’s no surefire way of beating writer’s block, but by being creative in your approach to brain drain, you might find just yourself quicker to get your brain back on track.

Mistake of the Month—Unnecessary Modifiers

As Mark Twain once wrote, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Unnecessary modifiers make your writing weak and bloated, burying your message in a deluge of quites and rathers. These modifiers add no value to the sentences in which they appear. The first step to fixing the problem is identifying the filler words in your writing.

These words, also called intensifiers or qualifiers, are almost always adverbs. Here’s a list of the most commonly abused modifiers:

• Actually
• Really
• Basically
• Probably
• Very
• Definitely
• Somewhat
• Kind of
• Extremely
• Practically

So why are they so bad? We use these words constantly, peppering our everyday speech with them so often that they cease to have any meaning, becoming transparent. In written communication, these modifiers take up valuable space. In a world where readers’ attention spans are growing shorter by the day, getting to the point as quickly and concisely as possible is essential. For additional tips on making your writing more concise, check out the always-helpful Purdue Online Writing Lab.

Beyond trimming the fat from your writing, “weasel” words like somewhat andkind of dilute your message. That’s great if you’re trying to spare a friend’s feelings—“Your one-man mariachi band kind of needs some work, Steve”—but not if you’re trying to make a strong point in business or academic writing. Don’t equivocate; get straight to the point and make it without hedging.

The best and easiest way to get rid of unnecessary modifiers is not to use them in the first place. However, if your existing work needs to be pared down, read each line and evaluate it for wordiness. More often than not, your sentences will be just fine without these modifiers. Unfortunately, you’ll need to approach them on a case-by-case basis, since sometimes the modifiers do change the meaning of your sentence. Let’s take a look as some examples:

Example: It was a very hot day in Albuquerque.

In this example, the word very does indicate an increased degree of heat, but is the sentence “It was a hot day in Albuquerque,” truly have a significantly different meaning? It can safely be cut.

Example: She was actually a robot.

In the sentence above, actually indicates that her identity as a robot is something of a surprise. Keep it.

Example: We’re really going to regret this in the morning.

Here, really is used as an intensifier, showing the degree to which they’re going to regret whatever it is. However, “We’re going to regret this in the morning” means the same thing. Cut it.

Example: I am definitely going to take a vacation this Christmas.

The word definitely adds nothing of value to this sentence—“I am definitely going” and “I am going” mean the same thing—but depending on the tone of the piece, it may be appropriate to leave in.

When trying to capture a character’s voice in fiction or in writing a casual email, feel free to modify away. However, more formal settings require more precise language. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Center has a great primer on how to tighten up your writing.

Which of these unnecessary modifiers to you use most often in your writing? Get out your red pen and be ruthless!

Conditional Verbs

Conditional verbs are used to create conditional sentences, which express hypothetical or unlikely situations. Conditional verbs can be used in the past, present, or future tense, and auxiliary verbs like can/could, will/would, and may/might are important in forming conditionals.

Consider the following conditional sentences, and pay close attention to the conditional verbs in each of them:

If my cousin had been just a little taller, he could have been a basketball player.

If I had enough money, I would travel around the world.

If Alex finishes his essay, he will come over tomorrow.

What Are Your Subject Line Pet Peeves?