Adjectives: Beware of suffixes -ical and -ic

One of the ways to form an adjective is to add the suffix ~ic or ~ical. There is no clear rule about when to use which. As a rule of thumb, many of the older nouns have the ~ical adjective, while most of the newer ones have ~ic suffix. The suffix ~ic or ~ical means...

The find-and-replace menace

OK. Don’t pounce on me as if I advised you not to use find and replace. I agree that find and replace is an excellent Word tool for editors. But you should also remember that you are dealing with a machine. If you want to replace all -ize ending words with -ise...