Answer: c.

Explanation:
Cue, in this context, comes from the theater. It’s something that happens in a play that signals a particular line or action to an actor. When the actor hears her cue, she knows its time to say or do whatever follows it. In speech, people sometimes shorten this up as “that’s my cue.”

At the Globe Theatre, back in the 16th century, the cues for Shakespearean actors were their actual lines whispered from backstage. Modern actors have to respond to less direct cues — they’re more like landmarks that indicate where to turn off a highway.

A queue, on the other hand, is a line-up. In fact, if you take Macarena as your cue to leave the wedding dance, you might find yourself queuing to leave.

Let’s see how people are doing with this one…

Google Poll:
My queue to leave: 133,000
My cue to leave: 453,000
My que to leave: 542,000

So, apparently more people get this wrong than right online. And their choice, que, is not actually a word.

Welp, that’s my cue.

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1. There are a significant number of people out there surfing the interwebs on a device they think is called a labtop. Yes, a labtop.

2. Bonified is a word. But it probably doesn’t mean what you think it does.

3. A newt was once an ewt and an apron was once an naperon. It’s because “an” was once the article used with all single nouns. And then things got a little strange …

4. As Ivy Wigmore discovered, there’s a word for the practice of referring to yourself by name.

5. We also found that there’s a word for referring to yourself as if you were a plurality.

6. Threshold has one H but withhold (which I discovered I’d been misspelling forever) has two.

7.  It’s OK to say healthy foods rather than healthful foods.

8. The word factoid can mean either something that’s trivial but true or something that a writer made up and presented as a fact.

9. I would have guessed that the word wow originated, at the earliest, in the 1920s but it’s much, much older than that.

10. A lot of people seem to think they’re devote Christians.

***

Have you come across any big grammar or spelling surprises? I’d love to hear about it.  Let me know in the comments or tweet me @tao_of_grammar.

Answer: a

Explanation:
Bona fide is a Latin term meaning in good faith. It’s more often used to mean authentic these days. Bonified is a common misspelling for it — and one that attracts a lot of mockery — but it’s actually a word. Bonify is a somewhat archaic term that means to make something good, especially something that was bad before. Both the bona of bona fide and the bon of bonify come from the Latin word for good, bonus.

Wordnik lists these among mistaken examples of bonified online:

• “At this point, the only thing that will change anything is a bonified miracle of the highest kind.”
  Face It, Progs: Obama’s a Dud « Antiwar.com Blog
• “It amazes me what the art community will accept as bonified art.”
  Situational Taxidermy
• “My father, a 52-year-old bonified curmudgeon, has not viewed any movie trailer in the last ten years with anything other than codified disinterest.”
  2008 June « the balcony fool

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Which is correct?
If you’re designing a ________ data center, green tech should be a priority.
a. brand-new
b. bran-new
c. new

Answer: c.

Explanation:
“Brand” doesn’t add anything to the meaning of “new,” so for formal writing it’s better to avoid it.

The other day, I heard something referred to as “brand new” and suddenly wondered where that expression comes from. The wonderful Word Detective explains that “brand” comes from Old English, in which it meant “fire” or “a torch.” Something that was brand-new would have been something just out of the fires of creation, like a forged sword or a pottery bowl. Shakespeare actually used “fire-new” to mean the same thing in several plays.

“Bran-new” is a common variation on “brand-new,” although it’s usually considered an error. If memory serves, it was used more commonly some years ago but it still appears fairly often online.

Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) digs into the history to respond to a reader message on Visual Thesaurus:

It appears that the advice that Dorothy got lo those many years ago was entirely backwards. Brand-new is the historically earlier form, and bran-new arose as a kind of reinterpretation. But that reinterpretation has proved remarkably sturdy over the years, to the extent that some speakers of English (as in Dorothy’s neck of the woods) take it to be the primary form, with brand-new as a mispronunciation/misspelling that ought to be “corrected.”

Ben Zimmer’s post and the Word Detective entry are both full of interesting information, so you probably want to go read them.

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Which is correct?
Ray Bradbury was a _______ Luddite but he allowed Fahrenheit 451 to be produced as an eBook — although it was only because his publishers refused to resign him without his consent to digital rights.
a. devout
b. devote

Answer: a.

Explanation:
This one popped up somewhere online the other day and I wondered, first, if it was just a typo. But when I started thinking about it, it occurred to me that this is a fairly tricky distinction. If you didn’t know better, “devote” could seem to be the correct word, a variation on “devoted.” It’s not, though — although one meaning of “devout” is “devoted.” So you could say you were a devoted Luddite and it would mean the same thing. You just can’t say you’re a devote Luddite.

I wondered how common “devote” was in the place of “devout,” and whether it might vary in terms of different religions or other things people can be devoted to.

Time for another Google poll:

devote Christian: 95,700; devout Christian: 1,730,000
devote Muslim: 42,900; devout Muslim: 691,000
devote Jew: 10,900; devout Jew: 378,000
devote atheist: 6,220; devout atheist: 75,000
devote Hindu: 5,900; devout Hindu: 124,000
devote Buddhist: 4,380; devout Buddhist: 94,800
devote Luddite: 9; devout Luddite: 607

Paul Torday discussed the late and lamented Ray Bradbury’s reluctant bow to the inevitability of digital formats.

Paul Brians covers devout vs. devote in his Common Errors in English Usage.

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Which is correct?
How do you spell the name of that red plant you see everywhere during the holiday season?
a. pointsetta
b. poinsetta
c. poinsettia
d. pointsettia

Answer: c.

Explanation:
This is a tricky one, unless you pronounce it correctly — which I freely admit I never did, growing up. I thought it was pronounced “pointsetta” and spelled it accordingly. Maybe that was the common pronunciation in my area or maybe everyone but me got it right. Let’s see how everyone’s doing with this one these days. Time for another Google poll:

pointsetta: 1,270,000
poinsetta: 6,790,000
poinsettia: 8,610,000
pointsettia: 2,430,000

Well, I feel better now. Way more people got this wrong than right, even if they took three different misspellings to accomplish it. And, lord knows, there are undoubtedly misspellings I didn’t think of.

Peggy Hazelwood discusses poinsettias and other commonly misspelled holiday words. Like me, she doesn’t pronounce the “i” — I have managed to drop the extra “t” from my poinsettia but saying “poyn-set-ee-a” still sounds to me like a pronunciation that would invite mockery. Altogether too correct.

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a. Whoa!
b. Woah!

Answer: a.

Explanation:
Whoa means hold it and is commonly used to express amazement. The word originated as a command to a horse to stop or slow down. Then there’s gee, gee ho, gee haw… Gee probably originated as go ye and haw as here. So gee haw means go ye here. (And that means either go right or go left, depending on the driving convention in your particular country.)

In her blog, separated by a common language, Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) details the history of whoa and variants:

The OED lists woah as a variant of woa which is a variant of whoa, which is a variant of the interjection who (not to be confused with the pronounwho–the interjection is pronounced as wo–which is also a variant of all these), which came into the language as a variant of ho! Here are the dates of the OED’s quotations for these spellings of the pronunciation /wo/ when it means ‘stop!’:

who c.1450-1859
wo 1787-1894
woa 1840-1892
woah 1856 (one example–included under the headword woa)
whoa 1843-1898 (but, of course, we know it’s still used)

There’s more: 

William Safire speculated that yee-haw derives from gee haw.

Cowboy Bob explains traditional horse commands.

Loveee is another common misspelling online.

***

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Which is correct?
Publicly traded companies cannot legally _________ financial results.
a. withold
b. withhold

Answer: b.

Explanation:
I was typing away this morning and had one of those lapses that seem to happen more frequently as I get older — I couldn’t remember whether “withhold” had one “h” or two. It’s an odd word, with two of them side by side there. I tried typing them both out to see which one looked right but they both looked funny so I resorted to looking it up.

Then I did a verbatim search on Google — does it drive anyone else slightly mad that Google returns results for what it thinks you meant instead of what you type? GRRRRR … Anyway, I did a verbatim search so it would stop correcting me and here’s what came up:

withold: 5,920,000 hits
withhold: 173,000,000 hits

So it looks like most people that use the word know how to spell it. Or, I suppose, look it up. That’s always a good option.

Withold vs. withhold is one of the questions in this spelling test. Maybe I’ll try it … I’m sure I’ll get that one right.
 

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Answer: b.

Explanation:
“Someday” refers to an unspecified time in the future, as in “Someday my prince will come.” As two words, “some day” refers to an unspecified but specific day: The interview will be scheduled for a particular but unspecified day the following week. “Someday” is incorrect in that context.

Confusingly, you can substitute “some day” for situations where “someday” works — but not vice versa.

Grammarist explains more about “someday” vs. “some day.”

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a. dependent
b. dependant

Answer: a.

Explanation:
Dependent is an adjective meaning reliant upon. Dependant is a noun, meaning one who is dependent, as a child is reliant upon her parents.

The value of the dependent variable depends on the input to the equation:

In a simple mathematical equation, for example:

a = b/c

the dependent variable, a , is determined by the values of b and c.

@grammarmonster provides more examples of dependent vs. dependant and a quiz.

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