Today we welcome our newest member of the blog, Audrey Sillett Lintner. Let's give her a big welcome! Greetings, all!  My name is Audrey, and I am your new Style Maven.  Hm?  Why am I wearing a bathrobe?  Because we’re dealing with a whole ’ nother kind of style today, so we had better get comfy.   Today we’ll consult the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style to see what it says about the use of “that” versus “which”.  Both are relative pronouns, and their usage is often confused.  Let’s have a look at the— Oof.  This thing is heavy. Ah, here we are.  According to the manual, a relative pronoun is “one that introduces a dependent (or relative) clause and relates it to the independent clause.”  A literary matchmaker, if you will.  Let’s find out how to ensure that our matches are made in heaven, rather than an editor’s slush pile. Let’s look at that .  No, not that over th ere.  I mean t...

I recently read through a thread in the “Word Nerds” group on LinkedIn and wanted to share some of these funny stories. It started with one commenter saying that every time she sees the word “misled,” her eyes single out the “isle” first, causing her to pronounce the word as “mild.” Others chimed in with “mizzled” or “missiled.” Another wrote that when she delivered a high school speech for class, she pronounced indict as in-dickt instead of in-dite. My husband had the same problem with “elicit” (E-lissit), pronouncing it e-lickt. The word I remember puzzling over when I was a new reader was “doughnut.” I had apparently just learned that words like “enough” were pronounced with the “f” sound. So, I went to my dad and asked, “What is a duff-nut?” Someone else remembered a "sermon my pastor gave in the young life of our startup church. He went on and on about the facade we put on for others. Only he used a hard "c" every time. FACK-aid.” Apparently, 20 years later, he stil...