Grammar Girl here January 24th is National Complement Day, so I have a quick and dirty tip to help you figure out which way to spell compliment.

I have a fascinating excerpt from a book called Saving our Prepositions, and a tidbit about how eight fonts got their names.

You look fabulous what an attractive audience you are today. Those were compliments, but there are two words pronounced that way, and it can be difficult to remember the two spellings.

Their home of phones, one is spelled with an I and the other is spelled with an E, and even though they sound the same, they mean different things.

A compliment with an I is a kind or flattering remark. If a friend says he likes your new shoes, he's giving you a compliment. He's complimenting you.

Complement with an E is a full crew or a set, and when something compliments something else, it means they go well together.

You may talk about a picture frame that compliments a photo or the crew compliment needed to operate a ship.

To remember the difference between the spellings of these words, be a nice person and tell yourself I like to give compliments.

Put the emphasis on the I when you say or think it, I like to give compliments, and that I can remind you that the type of flattering compliment is spelled with an I, and that was your quick and dirty tip.

Next, I have an excerpt from the book Saving our Prepositions by David Thatcher. All words can be problematic, but prepositions are particularly so, because their use and meaning often seem, and indeed often are,

so arbitrary and peculiar. The word idiom derives from the Greek for peculiar.

We might say that the idiomatic preposition tends to ward the figurative. The non idiomatic preposition tends to ward the literal.

As in this well-known jingle, the bird is on the wing, but that's absurd. The wing is on the bird.

We can sense the difference between the dog jumped at the man's throat, and I jumped at the chance, or between she looked into the mirror, and she looked into the problem.

The familiar prepositions like after, by, for, of, and on can vary toward the figurative, when found in phrases, the meaning of which cannot be determined by their constituent parts alone.

Examples are not that far to seek. After all, meaning all things considered.

By far, meaning to a great extent, or good, meaning permanently, of course, meaning certainly, and on edge, meaning nervous.

One explanation for misused prepositions may lie in a hybrid phenomenon we might call crossover, or as Paul Bryan's calls it cross-pollination.

This is essentially a problem of transposition, rather like the verbal confusion that produces spoonerisms, malapropisms, and portmanteaux words like slimy, lithe plus slimy, and Lewis Carroll's jabberwocky.

When he asked, what do you mean by that incinuendo? Archie Bunker had conflated inuendo and incinuation, and created high verbal comedy.

My niece, as a young slip of a girl, did the same thing once when she asked me to fetch her an ice cream from the reshivirator.

The semi-eliterate, irregardless, was probably spawned by irrespective.

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