Things I once taught. Please forgive me

 Some of the things in the materials for my editing class at Loyola University Maryland over twenty-four years leave me embarrassed and repentant. 

Another Somewhere, I think from the late John Bremner, I picked up the idea that the meaning of another must be limited to "one more of the same." I told my students, "If you sell your cow for five magic beans and then win five more in a wager, you have won another five beans. If you win six or four, you have won six or four more, not another six or four." Pace, Bremnerians, I do not find any other authority who supports this. 

Cohort In the good old days when everyone studied Latin, you knew that a cohort was a collective noun meaning a tenth of a legion, 300-600 soldiers, and, by extension, an identifiable group. We Baby Boomers are a birth cohort, now mercifully shuffling off the stage. But cohort, meaning "colleague," "associate," or "companion" has been in use since the eighteenth century, Bryan Garner points out, and has regularly cropped up since before the Baby Boomers were born. 

Dilemma I told my charges that dilemma means a choice between two equally unpleasant options, the rock and the hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, Scylla and Charybdis. My reasoning was based on etymology: di, "two," and lemma, "assumptions." Do not use dilemma, I said, when "difficulty," "predicament," or "quandary" would do. Now I already knew that etymology is not destiny and had had enough sense to tell my students that decimate does not mean "eliminate one in ten" unless you happen to be a centurion. But it was some time until I had occasion to check the dilemma entry in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage and discovered that the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler's stricture is not observed in general usage. 

Following Do not use as a preposition, I instructed. Use after instead, I said: "after the class," not "following the class." Merriam-Webster dates the use of following as a preposition from 1926, so I assume somebody suspicious of newfangled usages added it to the prohibitions in the Associated Press Stylebook. It was there in the 1986 edition I acquired when I started work at The Sun, but at some point in the intervening four decades AP quietly dropped the entry over the side.

Mull You can mull wine or cider, I said, but stop there. But mull over for "ponder" is standard usage and has been for some time. There is always a risk when you become a tinpot despot that you will turn your idiosyncratic preferences about language into diktats. 

Singular they I [cough] was a late arrival at the party. 

In my defense, I did teach my students that they could split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, begin sentences with and and but, use that to refer to human beings, and the other rejections of junk usage instructions to be found in my Bad Advice: The most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing. But still, what do you have to fess up?