I'm a new friend of mine.

Grammar girl here.

I'm a new on Foculty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

And happy National Grammar Day, which is March 4th, when a lot of you will be listening

to the show.

You can find some fun songs and stories and other diversions at NationalGrammarDay.com.

Next week I'll have the winning poem from the Aces National Grammar Day poetry contest.

But today I'll answer a timely word question and then I have a big fun follow up about

the word pairs segment from last week.

First Doug wrote, with the recent invasion of Ukraine, I've heard several news, military

and political commentators say, material with regard to what I've gathered through context

clues is supplies, especially military in nature.

And I don't know if this is a real accepted word in English with its own distinct definition,

or if people are using the foreign pronunciation of material and just trying to sound smart.

Well, thanks for the question Doug.

Material is indeed a word of its own, but it's a direct borrowing from French.

It's spelled with an E instead of an A near the end, and often has an accent mark above

the first E, so it's MAT, Accented E, R-I-E-L.

And you're right that it's mostly come to mean military equipment and supplies.

And both the Oxford English Dictionary and Edim online say it's used as a distinction

from personnel, so countries can send both personnel and material.

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