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...
What’s the difference between drunk and drunken? If you dig through the linguistic corpora (collections of carefully tagged texts used by linguists and lexicographers), you’ll find that we celebrate with drunken revelry and break into drunken...
A Quebec listener asks: In the phrases it’s a girl, or it’s raining, what exactly is the it here? It’s called the weather it or the dummy it, and it serves a placeholder inserted to make the sentence function grammatically. This is...
Awfully might seem like an awful choice for a positive adverb, as in awfully talented, but it makes sense given the history of awful. Once intended to mean “filled with awe,” it’s now a general intensifier. The process of semantic weakening has...
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...
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is grammatical, even if nobody would say it outside a linguistic stunt. The trick is polysemy: buffalo can mean bison, bully or to intimidate, or refer to Buffalo, New York, with some...