Writers should busy themselves with other things.
Insure and ensure can be used interchangeably to mean “make certain.”
In the United States, however, the spelling insure is generally preferred to ensure, and only insure can be used to mean “indemnify against loss.”
It depends on whom you ask. Some editors will still change “to boldly go where no man has gone before” to “to go boldly . . .” But other pundits now consider the taboo against split infinitives all but passé. The taboo was introduced by eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammarians for unknown reasons.
You should not use the word irregardless ever. The word is redundant because the negative prefix “ir” does the same work as the negative suffix “less”. Use regardless instead. Irregardless, some folks use it anyway.
No, the word crap is derived from the first flush lavatory or toilet. Crapper’s Valveless Water Waste Preventor was developed in 1837 by English sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper.
In Old English, scot meant a payment, or one’s share of a payment. To go scot free meant escaping that charge.
The word Nightmare was named after a creature but not a horse. According to ancient superstition dating back to the eighth century in England, people thought a female monster or spirit, a so-called mare, would sit upon a sleeper’s chest. This would cause a feeling of suffocation from which the sleeper would try to free…
Say it whichever way you like. The pronouns those and them are both correctly used as objects in this passage.