Word Wednesdays

Oh, Wednesday! How you are overlooked as a source of entertainment and enjoyment. Although Wednesday is typically one of the busiest and most hectic days, at Frause it is also one of our favorites. Here, it isn’t just Wednesday; it’s Word Wednesday.

Every Word Wednesday, the Frause team gathers in our morning huddle to discuss grammar, etymology and the ever-controversial Oxford comma. Lately we have been holding competitions to see who can define the most obscure words correctly. In PR, words are the tools of our trade. And we have a lot of them. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 600,000 words and phrases in the English language. Among the most recent are “auto-complete,” “brain candy” and “cryonaut.” Look them up and maybe you will gain some insight into today’s pop culture. The most commonly used word, you ask? “The.” According to the Oxford English Corpus, it has been used almost 100 million times since the spring of 2010- I’ve already used it eleven times, and that’s just in the past few minutes!

This week, we talked about the appropriate use of hyphens. For example, I dream of living in a 6,000-square-foot loft on the waterfront, although I currently live in an apartment that is only 800 square feet. I still dare to dream. We also had a competition to correctly match these definitions. Can you match them correctly?

And now, Word Wednesdays will be even better because everyone can participate. Like us on Facebook and stay tuned for our Word Wednesday posts!

-Emily Nauseda