Beginning this week, the Forum is giving the Use and Misuse section its own front-panel display, the better to encourage Forum members to post questions and share insights about English grammar and usage.
For starters, I am sharing the expert grammar opinions I have obtained on the usage of the adjective “contiguous,” which, it will be recalled, I used twice last May 10 in the course of a discussion in the Forum on subject-verb agreement. My use of “contiguous” was disputed by Forum member maxsims, who insisted that I should have used the word “continuous” instead.
The English grammar experts who graciously shared their thoughts on the word-choice dispute are Prof. Richard Lederer, “Looking at Language” syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States; Prof. Paul Brians, emeritus professor of English at Washington State University-Pullman; Jan Freeman, “The Word” language columnist of the
Boston Sunday Globe; Prof. Ben Yagoda, journalism professor at the University of Delaware and freelance journalist for
The New York Times and
Newsweek; and the editors of Merriam-Webster Inc., publisher of the
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged and the
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary.
Click to read their views now on the usage of “contiguous” and “continuous”!
