It’s a billboard custom-tailored to grammar buffs. “Every day we help people get back to their everyday,” proclaims the ad for Keck Medical Center of USC. In that single sentence, the copy writer does ...
The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...
The word ‘plural’ comes from the Old French ‘plurel’ which means ‘more than one’. A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you ...
Linguists have long believed that the sound of a word reveals nothing about its meaning, with a few exceptions of words like “buzz” or “beep” that are known as onomatopoeia. But a new study analyzing ...
The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...
Writers and language geeks inherit a ranking system of sorts: verbs good, adjectives bad, nouns sadly unavoidable. Verbs are action, verve! “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken ...