Sunday, April 12, 2015

jam/jamb: Common Errors in English Usage Entry for Sunday, April 12, 2015

jam/jamb
The only common use for the word “jamb” is to label the vertical part of the frame of a door or window. It comes from the French word for “leg”; think of the two side pieces of the frame as legs on either side of the opening. For all other uses, it’s “jam”: stuck in a jam, traffic jam, logjam, jam session, etc.


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This is the ten-year anniversary of the Common Errors in English Usage calendar. To celebrate, we are bringing back some of our favorite interesting, funny, but sometimes merely silly entries through the years before going on hiatus in 2016.

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