Oh, adjectives. Sometimes you are indeed the banana peel of the parts of speech. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Authors Against Adjectives” Grant, how do you feel about adjectives? Love them. Yeah? They’re great...
Patience, Hope, and Charity are pretty ambitious things to name your children. But what about Hate-evil, Be-courteous, or Search-the-scriptures? Or Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith? Puritan parents sometimes gave their kids so as to encourage those...
Is a number a noun or an adjective? Even dictionary editors struggle with how to classify parts of speech. Like color, such words often lie along a spectrum, and asking at what point the number seven goes from a noun to an adjective is like asking...
Dole is a collective noun for doves, related to a Latin word for sadness. A news story about a vigil used it for doves released in memory of someone who had died. It belongs with bird-group terms such as a famous murmuration of starlings and other...
Is it okay to make a verb out of a noun? Yes! It’s estimated that twenty percent of English verbs started as nouns. Just think of the head-to-toe mnemonic: you can head off a problem, face a situation, nose around, shoulder responsibility...
If your friend says she’s coming to town Sunday week, exactly when should you expect to see her? What do you call those typographical symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? Plus grass widows, the linguistic phenomenon called creaky...