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Grammar Girl here, I'm Minyon Fogardy.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about how to spell a dew

and a medium-middle about pronouns and antecedents.

Michael from San Francisco wants to know why he keeps seeing people write

without further ado, A-D-I-E-U,

instead of without further ado, A-D-O.

Is it sheer ignorance or hyper correction, he asks?

Well, the proper form is without further ado, A-D-O,

and a dew is a hubbub, a bustle, a flurry, or a fuss.

Another common phrase from the title of a Shakespeare play

is much ado about nothing.

A dew, A-D-I-E-U, is the French word for goodbye.

English just borrowed it directly from French.

A dew, A-D-O, was originally a contraction of the words,

at dew, which was another way of saying,

to dew, because some of the languages spoken by the Norse invaders

in Northern England used the word at the way we use the word to.

And according to the Oxford English Dictionary,

it looks like a dew is still used to mean to dew in Scottish English

and maybe in Northern England.

Here's an example sentence from a Scottish dictionary

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