After publishing my last post on grammar, I was proclaimed by one of my siblings “a real nerd.” This public declaration of dorkery got me thinking about nerds. While the term was once pejorative, the ...

Like the subject, the object is usually a noun (‘the piano’) or a noun phrase, (‘the big, black grand piano’). Verbs that take objects describe some kind of action rather than a state of being.

A major ‘rule’ many of us are familiar with is that ‘between’ is used with two persons or things, and ‘among’ is the correct preposition when they are more than two. I must confess that, in the early ...