How well do you know the difference between compliment and complement (or variations thereof)? Test yourself by filling in the blanks (answers are at end of this post; no peeking ahead of time!).

1. I’m trying to __________ you on your choice of memes for that marketing blitz, but others may feel differently about that meme.
2.  The fancy restaurant staff on your cruise ship will offer food and wine that __________ each other.
3. “You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!” __________ of Oprah Winfrey.
4. The __________ upgrade on your cruise ship stateroom is __________ of the cruise line as you are a valued cruiser.
5. If you are __________ me about my singing skills, I’m going to be forever in your debt; but if you don’t __________ me, you’ll get social media shamed bigtime, __________ of me and my close friends.

Click Here for Answer Key. Let us know in the comments how you did!

A few years ago, I met with Zelda (fake name to protect the innocent) to talk about calendar scheduling so team meetings wouldn’t bump into each other. I asked Zelda how often a particular meeting was held, and she said it was held fortnight. Umm, what? I had to ‘fess up that I didn’t know what that word meant. Zelda said it meant the meeting would be held every two weeks.

Maybe it was just me, but I didn’t understand why she just didn’t say “every two weeks” or “bi-weekly.” After our meeting, it reminded me about an SDA session on business writing. The speaker said your writing should be clear, concise, and conversational. The speaker said to question whether it’s conversational by asking, “Can I say this out loud without sounding foolish?”  So yeah, I am not going to use the word fortnight when I’m explaining meeting occurrences to coworkers. I’m choosing to stick with every two weeks rather than “the meeting will be held on Friday fortnight.” (I searched on fortnight and according to vocabulary.com, the word is still used in Great Britain and that in the U.S., folks typically just say “two weeks.”)

Which brings me to Taylor Swift. The lyrics to one of her songs includes, “For a fortnight there we were …”. It’s a catchy song. I guess it’s less cumbersome to sing “For two weeks there we were…”.

It will be interesting to see if diehard Swifties start using fortnight conversationally, now that TS has brought it to the forefront.

Special thanks to  Judy Beebe, FSDA,  of the Seattle Chapter, for providing our current Word Nerd feature.

Many moons ago Gloria Jackson wrote an SDA blog about Homophones……words that are pronounced alike but have different meanings…..or spellings.

Such as: accept and except.

Both are primarily pronounced “ek” cept or “ak” cept.  Very similar sounding.

Accept functions as a verb….to receive or take something willingly.

Except is most often a verb (but can be a preposition)....to leave out or exclude (key here is “ex”…..exclude).

For example:

I accept your gift of a chocolate cake (yes, I would).

All the kitties were adopted except one (sad little kitty).

And as a bonus….I’ll put them in one glorious sentence:

I would most gladly accept your platter of delicious cupcakes, except the chocolate one with mustard frosting.

For more information on “accept vs except” please see the “Merriam Webster” site. 

Thanks to Carol Wanda Spradlin, CDFA, for providing our current Word Nerd feature.

Carol Wanda is the Office Manager for Baylis Architects in Bellevue, WA and

is a member of  the SDA Seattle Chapter.