Gramer Girl here. I'm Manion Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing,

history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll talk about the difference between the words

historic and historical, and about how to use punctuation for pacing.

The Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden just announced that Kamala Harris is his

pick for Vice President, and she is the first of many things. Her father immigrated to the US

from Jamaica, and her mother immigrated from India, so she is both the first black woman to be

on a major presidential ticket and the first person of Indian descent. And here's a piece of trivia

that surprised me. According to the website 538, she's also the first person from west of the

Rockies to ever be on the ticket for the Democratic Party, as President or Vice President. That was

amazing to me. Republicans by contrast have nominated eight people from the west, but not the

Democrats. So with all those firsts, do we call her selection historic or historical? Well,

historic is the word you want to use to describe an item or event that's important or influential

in history. So the right way to say it is that Kamala's selection is historic. It's definitely an

important milestone in our history with all those firsts. Other historic things are historic

documents like the Magna Carta, historic ruins like the Roman Forum, historic battlefields like

the one at Gettysburg, and historic artifacts like the Rosetta Stone. All of these are important

or famous things from the past. You know the names of all or most of those things because they were

significant. Historical, on the other hand, is the word you can use to describe anything from the

past, important or not. A historical event is just something that happened in the past. It

doesn't have to be an event that people are going to talk about and remember as important

50 years from now. For example, Rutherford Behaze choosing William Wheeler as his vice president

is a historical event because it happened a long time ago in 1876. But as far as I know, it wasn't

...