One of the many responsibilities of an editor is making sure that common sayings are used correctly. This obviously includes checking and correcting the phrasing (it’s “running the gauntlet”, not “running through the gauntlet”). For historically-based projects, it also means verifying that a figure of speech actually existed at the time that it’s being used. For fantasy and science fiction projects, it means querying whether a colloquialism that developed here on our world would be relevant enough to have evolved on another (if we didn’t bring it with us).
The Phrase Finder is a great reference site. It’s an alphabetical and searchable list of over 1,500 phrases, along with their researched and referenced meanings and origins. With the Phrase Finder, researching common phrases is as easy as pie.
- Style Guides (100%)
- EFA SF Bay (92.8%)
- Making Grammar Interesting (88.2%)
- Librarians Love a Challenge (88.2%)
- A different kind of search engine (81%)
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