by Amy Tourond

As one of the editors of this fabulous magazine, I strive to represent the English language as correctly as possible. Yes, I can be a bit like the grammar police. Maybe it comes from the grammar class I attended each week throughout grade school. We learned contractions, compound words, compound sentences, pronouns, comma usage, verb tenses and so much more. Correct use of the written and spoken word was drilled into us, and I am grateful for that even though it means I get a little prickly about a few very common faux pas.

Among my favorites are unthawed and irregardless. Interestingly, my spell check thinks these are legitimate words, and a check on dictionary.com confirms they are indeed real words but are labeled as nonstandard. How exactly does one un-thaw something? By undoing the thawing process, you would simply be freezing it. Or would you? Irregardless is a whole other complicated situation, being constructed with a double negative of ‘ir’ and ‘less’. We don’t even write sentences using double negatives, so let’s just agree to drop the ‘ir’, regardless of the context.

With dog show language, the clear winner has to be the misuse of Nationals. It is unclear when people started changing the National Specialty to the Nationals. “See you at Nationals.” “Good luck at Nationals.” “We did well at Nationals.” “Nationals is in Topeka.” And perhaps my favorite is the Weimaraner Club of America creating a logo for this year’s event which says “WCA Nationals 2019.”

It just isn’t right, so in an effort to help clear up the proper use of the word National vs. Nationals, I have created this fun chart.