Grammar Girl here, this week I have a quick and dirty tip about arch enemies, a show about

the conjunction nor, and a tidbit about Baeowulf, the TV show Firefly, and the word Reaver.

Last week I got an email from Rob T, who found a spelling mistake on my about grammar

girl page.

There's a segment that reads like this.

Minyeon believes that learning is fun and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder

for lifelong study.

She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world.

Her arch enemy, two words, is the evil grammar maven, who inspires terror in the untrained

and is neither friendly nor helpful.

I had written arch enemy as two words, and Rob believed it should be one word.

And when I started researching the spellings, I found a bunch of interesting things.

First, I checked five dictionaries, Merriam Webster, AmericanHeritageDictionary.com, the

Macmillan Dictionary, and the Collins Dictionary.

They all spell it as one word.

But some of them noted that it's often used to refer to the devil, and when it is,

it's capitalized.

So I didn't know that.

Then I checked the Oxford English Dictionary, because I wanted to see if the spelling had

changed over time.

Often a word will start out as two words and later become merged into one word.

That wasn't exactly the case here.

...