Quick tips

When you’re finishing a letter or e-mail, how should you capitalise the final phrase (or ‘complimentary close’, to give it its official name)? Should you give all the words a capital letter, just the first one, or none at all? This is a point that even native speakers are often uncertain about!

The answer is: you capitalise only the first one. This applies to both business and personal correspondence, and to both UK and US English. The following are therefore all written correctly:

Kind regards
Best regards
With love
Yours sincerely
Sincerely yours
With best wishes
Yours faithfully
Yours truly

Of course, if there is only one word in the close, then that gets a capital:

Love
Regards
Sincerely
Cordially
Yours
Cheers
Best

©2013 Baxter Publishing, Hilversum, The Netherlands

It’s a euro. The rule for using a or an is that we use a before a consonant and an before a vowel. But this rule is based on pronunciation, not spelling.

Sometimes, as in the case of euro, a word begins with a vowel in the spelling, but with a consonant in the pronunciation. Euro is pronounced you-roh, and y here is a consonant. It therefore takes a – just like other words that begin with a y, like year and yard.

Other words that begin with a vowel in the spelling but a consonant in the pronunciation, and therefore take a, include:

a European treaty
a Uruguayan soldier
a unit
a university education
a US spokesman
a unified theory
a euphemism
a Unilever product
a unique event
a universal principle
a United Nations official
a union official
a useful object
a one-day event

©2013 Baxter Publishing, Hilversum, The Netherlands

The British doctor practises medicine at his practice

You’ll find that the UK spell checker on your computer allows both practice and practise. Does that mean you can choose which one you like? If only life – and in particular English–were that simple!

No, when practice is a noun, it is spelt with c in British English:

What does this mean in practice?
We need to adopt best practices.
Practice makes perfect.

However, when it is a verb, it is spelt with s:

You must practise more often.
He practises medicine in London.

Of course, that means you need to know how to tell whether it’s a noun or a verb! But that’s not too hard. As a rule of thumb, a verb can have words like I, you or he before it, whereas a noun can have words like the, his or some in that position.

Thanks to Noah Webster,the 18th/19th-century American teacher and dictionary-maker, the spelling in US English is more straightforward. Both the noun and the verb are spelt with c:

Noun: It takes a lot of practice to get it right.

Verb: The team is going to practice this afternoon.
Verb: I haven’t practiced for years.

©2013 Baxter Publishing, Hilversum, The Netherlands

Holiday – or vacation?

Are you just back from holiday – or vacation? At first sight, holiday and vacation might seem to mean the same thing, but which word people use depends on who they are, where they are, what their  job is and who decides they can have time off!

The British go on holiday (on hols for short), but Americans go on vacation. The British, when lying on the beach on the Costa del Sol, are holidaymakers holidaying in Spain, while their American cousins, lounging on Miami Beach, are vacationers vacationing.

The word holiday comes from holy day, a religious festival, and in the US, holiday is reserved for days that really do have a religious origin (like Christmas Day and Easter Day), and, by extension, to paid public holidays, like New Year’s Day, Independence Day and Thanksgiving Day. Americans will often wish each other Happy Holidays around Christmas, especially if they wish to make their greeting neutral as far as religion is concerned.

Public holidays in Britain, designated by the government, are known as bank holidays. They were originally days when the banks were shut. Now they’re general holidays, often on a Monday.

The word vacation is also used in Britain for the holiday periods at universities and law courts. It’s sometimes shortened to vac, so students may talk about the long vac, the summer vac, etc. At American universities, such periods are usually called a recess (the summer recess, the fall recess, etc.), the word also used by the British parliament and the US Congress for their breaks.

©2013 Baxter Publishing, Hilversum, The Netherlands