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...
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...
Can sentences end with a preposition? Yes! Grant assures a listener that all experts, including the most conservative of linguists and lexicographers, agree that a preposition as the last word in a sentence is something up with which we shall put...