How to write photo captions. The real difference between ‘immigrate’ and ‘emigrate.’ Ko Pha-ngan'd
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Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson report.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about writing photo captions and whether you really know the difference between the words immigrate and emigrate. This question comes from a listener. Linda said, I'd like to see tips that address correct pronoun usage in social media captions. For example, if I caption a photo on a social media platform, I might type in Taylor Swift and me.

Many people, however, would type in Taylor Swift and I. I use me under the assumption that the unwritten words preceding the caption would be, this is a photo of Taylor Swift and me. Well, you're right, Linda. Choosing between me and I in photo captions is trickier than it seems. As you've noticed, a lot of people might default to writing Taylor Swift and I, but Taylor Swift and me is actually correct.

The key to solving this grammar puzzle lies in understanding how subjects and objects work in English sentences. Think of subjects as the star performers in your sentence. They're the ones doing the action. Objects, on the other hand, are on the receiving end of the action, or they come after prepositions like of, to, or with.

When we use pronouns like I and me, we're making a choice based on whether we need a subject or an object. I is what we call a subject pronoun. It's for when we're the one doing something. Me is an object pronoun. We use it when we're receiving the action or following a preposition. So let's take a look at some examples. I took a photo with Taylor Swift. In this sentence, I is doing the taking.

Taylor Swift took a photo with me. Me comes after the preposition with. This is a photo of Taylor Swift and me. Me follows the preposition of.

Now, here's where Linda's insight about photo captions comes in. When we write a caption like Taylor Swift and me, we're actually creating a shortened version of a complete thought. This is a photo of Taylor Swift and me. Those unstated words at the beginning, this is a photo of, are important because they contain the preposition of. Since me is the object of this implied preposition, it's the correct choice.

And here's something interesting. People who write the incorrect Taylor Swift and I may not be using correct grammar, but they are giving us a perfect example of something linguists call hypercorrection. In other words, being so worried about making a grammar mistake that we end up making a different one. Many of us learned this habit because we heard constant corrections growing up, like it's not me and Taylor went to the store, it's Taylor and I went to the store.

These corrections stick with us, creating sort of a linguistic anxiety where I feel safer or more proper than me. A good trick to figure out which pronoun to use is to swap their position in your sentence and see if things still make sense in your implied sentence. So let's say you wrote Taylor Swift and I, as in this is a photo of Taylor Swift and I.

If you swapped the noun and pronoun, you'd have, this is a photo of I and Taylor Swift. Well, that sounds wrong, doesn't it? Well, when I sounds wrong, when it comes first, then use me in your sentence instead. But here's a rule you should stick to if you want to be proper. Taylor Swift comes first. Swifties will agree, I'm sure.

The traditional rule says we should put others before ourselves. So Taylor Swifted me rather than me and Taylor Swift. This isn't just about grammar. It's what linguists call a politeness convention. It's like holding the door open for someone, a small gesture that shows consideration for others. While we're on the subject, let's talk about a few other glitches people run into when they're writing captions.

Have you noticed how photo captions often drop words like the and a? Like writing dog chasing ball instead of a dog chasing a ball? This style, sometimes called headline-ese, comes from newspaper caption traditions. With print newspapers, space was precious. But online and on social media, we have more room to play. So using articles can make captions feel more natural and conversational. Go right ahead.

Here's another head scratcher. Should you write at Central Park or in Central Park? The choice of preposition actually depends on how you're thinking about this space. At suggests a point on a map, while in implies being inside the boundaries of a place.

If you say at Central Park, it seems like you're saying you've arrived there. But in Central Park implies that the photo was taken while you were spending some time in the park. Both versions are correct, but they can sometimes paint a slightly different picture in our mind. Now, what about when you're posting throwback pics? Should you write in Paris last summer or last summer in Paris?

Both are correct, of course, but there's a little room for nuance here. Put Paris first if you want to emphasize the place itself. Or put summer first if you want to highlight that traveling to Paris was something you've done in the past. Perfect for those hashtag throwback Thursday posts. So there you go, a few simple grammar guidelines to help you caption your photos like a pro.

That segment was by Karen Lundy, a career writer and editor. In the late 90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com.

Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson Report.

So you finally get it squared away in your thinking, writing, and speaking that the word immigrate means to go into a new country to live, and the word emigrate means to exit a country to go live somewhere else. Grammarians often teach that people either immigrate to or emigrate from, but they do not immigrate from or emigrate to. They

They point to the beginning vowel of each word as a way to remember which word to use. Immigrate starts with I, and so does the word in. Emigrate starts with E, and so does the word exit. It all seems so very cut and dried until it isn't.

If you're searching for information about ancestors who came to the United States from other countries in the late 1800s to mid-1900s, you might find a document called the Declaration of Intention. That document is often referred to as First Papers because it was one of the first forms a person submitted to become a U.S. citizen.

After finding such a document, you excitedly start reading your ancestor's declaration of intention that gives you all sorts of information, such as height, weight, eye color, place of birth, port of departure, and name of the ship on which the person traveled. But you're surprised to see that on this official form your ancestor signed, it says, I emigrated, with an E, to the United States of America from fill in the blank.

Well, that's curious. In one sentence, it says a person emigrated to one place and from another.

Upon further research, you discover that wording is exactly the same on many declarations of intention. As you continue researching your ancestry, you might run across a directory, such as the 1873 History and Directory of Yates County, New York, where on page after page, it says people emigrated to various places in the United States, and it names those places where they settled.

And then you might discover that between the years 1852 and 1853, the state of Wisconsin had an office of emigration that existed not to aid people in exiting the state, but for the purpose of attracting people, especially German-speaking Europeans, to come into the state and take up residence.

By then, maybe you're thinking it's just antiquated language or people way back then not knowing which words to use. But then you discover some congressional records from the late 1970s, such as the Emigration Waiver or Waiver of Freedom of Emigration, that speak of people from the countries of Romania and Hungary emigrating to the United States, West Germany or Israel.

At this point, you might be tempted to send an email to your former English teacher or to Grammar Girl about how badly you've been led astray by the insistence that people immigrate into and emigrate out of a country. But please don't. Instead, let's look at those two words and their usages a little more closely.

Now, most if not all dictionaries say that an immigrant is a person who enters into a country to become a resident. And an emigrant is a person who leaves or exits a country to reside elsewhere.

But that does not mean that immigrants and emigrants are two different types of people who undertake two different activities. Emigrants who leave one place and settle in another are also immigrants. Or to say it another way, immigrants who settle in a new country are also emigrants of the country they left.

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary, in answer to the question, must an immigrant also be an emigrant, says there's little difference semantically between the two words because both refer to a person who leaves one country and moves to another. That dictionary also confirms that both immigrate and emigrate have been used interchangeably, and significant evidence exists that

showing those words used with a variety of overlapping prepositions. To quote that dictionary, quote, the borders between these words are somewhat porous, unquote. Similarly, on an Ask the Editor page of the Britannica dictionary, it says that immigrate and emigrate both mean someone is moving from one country to another, and sometimes both words are used the same way.

So what should we do in light of this information? Is there a difference between immigrate and emigrate? Does it matter how we use those two words? Well, although there's a difference not only in spelling, but also in meaning, the usage of those two words demonstrates it's not something to be dogmatic about.

Technically, emigrate means to exit and immigrate means to enter. But sometimes the choice of words is based on the perspective of the one using it and if the emphasis or focus is on exiting or entering a country. Other times, it's just a matter of choosing one word for the sake of economy of words or not having an awkward sounding sentence.

Even though it is grammatically correct to say that your great-grandpa immigrated to the United States and emigrated from Germany, it is grammatically correct and makes sense to say the same thing in four different ways without altering the meaning. You could say that he emigrated from Germany to the United States, emigrated to the United States from Germany, immigrated from Germany to the United States, or immigrated to the United States from Germany.

regardless of how you use immigrate and emigrate or how you see those words being used, it's important to remember that even though they have different meanings, they refer to the same person and event, which is a person who moved from one country to another to take up residence. Therefore, the answer to the question of whether immigrants or emigrants are coming or going is yes. Okay.

That segment was written by Brenda Thomas, a freelance writer who enjoys writing about a variety of topics in the humanities and education. Before we get to the familect, in a recent interview, Hedwin Newton and I talked about mysals, words we pronounce wrong because we've only read them. And a listener named Mark called in to share his mysal.

Hi Mignon, I just listened to your latest podcast with Hedwyn and I really enjoyed it, especially the part about the mizeled words. I think one of mine would be the word awry. Whenever I read it, I always thought it was pronounced awry and it wasn't for years until I realised that it was the same word as when people said awry. Anyway, I thought I'd just let you know in case you want to add it as another segment along with the familex. Thanks again, bye.

Thanks, Mark. This is another common problem that arises from the erratic spelling we have in English. And I think we're all going to enjoy an interview I have coming up in late May with Gabe Henry, who has a fabulous new book coming out called Enough is Enough, all about the history of the English spelling reform movement. I'm reading an advanced review edition right now and loving it. And next, I have a really fun familect from Debbie.

Hi Grammar Girl, this is Debbie. I was going to tell you about being Koh Phangan. So a long, long time ago when my husband and I first got together, we were travelling around Asia and we got to Thailand and he wanted to share with me this beautiful, quiet island that he'd visited previously and he wanted

us to visit together to appreciate it. So we got the boat to Koh Samui and then we found the boat to take us to Koh Phangan, a smaller island. So we started the journey over and it was really beautiful and the sun was just starting to go down. And as we got closer, we could see lights

And he was looking confused. And he said, I really do not remember all these lights. And we got closer and closer. And all these buildings appeared. And it was lit up like a Christmas tree. And he looked so miserable and so crestfallen. In the two years since he'd last been there, the place had been transformed into a huge backpacker area.

complete with full moon raves, ecstasy being passed around. And he looked so crestfallen that now every time we go somewhere,

that we're disappointed by, somewhere we've been to previously and it's changed, like a restaurant or somewhere we used to travel to. We always look at each other and say, you know, we've been Koh Phangan'd. Or if we want to go somewhere and we say, do you think we might be Koh Phangan'd here? Okay, thank you.

Thanks so much, Debbie. I love this so much. You painted such a picture that I felt disappointed with all the lights and noise right along with you. If you want to share the story of your family act, a word or phrase that you use only with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. And if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoops in marketing, Dan Feierabend in audio, Holly Hutchings in digital operations, Morgan Christensen in advertising, and Brandon Goetjes, director of podcasts, who just got back from an outdoor guys trip to Idaho. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl, and author of the tip-a-day book, The Grammar Daily. That's all. Thanks for listening.