Grammar girl here, I'm in Yon Fogarty and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about

how many spaces to put after a colon. A meeting middle about how Shakespeare used prepositions

and it tipped it about what the British mean when they call something a treat. And now

your quick and dirty tip. After my podcast explaining why we now put one space after a period

at the end of a sentence. Rebecca wrote in to ask how many spaces go after a colon.

Just as with the period, it used to be common to put two spaces after a colon. But now

most style guides that address the matter, for example the Chicago Manual of Style, recommend

using one space after a colon. And that was your quick and dirty tip. Put one space after

a colon, not two. Next, for your meeting middle, I have an excerpt about Shakespeare and how

he used prepositions from David Thatcher's book, Saving Our Prepositions. There's a scholarly

consensus that Shakespeare contributed about 1800 words and phrases to the English language.

Most of his lexical innovations were nouns, for example addition, assassination, bedroom,

miscontent, investment, luggage, moonbeam, radiance, watchdog and zany, and verbs arouse

the smurch, donate, grovel, impede, negotiate, submerge, undervalue and widen. And adjectives,

extremists, bloodstained, deafening, equivocal, fashionable, jaded, lonely, obscene, sanctimonious

and unreal. A few adverbs also figure as products of his inventiveness, for example objectively,

rightly, unaware and vastly. But he did not add one single preposition to the 50 or so,

which already existed in his time. They had been in existence for centuries, and he made

use of all of them with a few exceptions, though some of these he employs as other parts of

speech, alongside, across, amidst, around, a top, inside and outside. He never uses on

too, a word first recorded in 1715. In fact, as is the case with the English language in

general, prepositions, together with articles, pronouns and conjunctions, are the most frequently

...