For those who boldly violate the Prime Directive by trying to enrich the general public’s understanding of English grammar and thus change the planetary culture, each tiny triumph is something to ...

Gerunds are the -ing form of a verb, and infinitives are the to + base form. These words can be confusing; they combine the meaning of a verb with the grammar of a noun. My father asked me to phone ...

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: ...

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...

There's an odd noise echoing through the Idler Academy, a pretty 19th century shop in Notting Hill, west London, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. "A pronoun is a word that stands in place of a noun," ...

My friend Oliver Kamm and I have fallen out. He has a new book out in February called Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage. The blurb says that “to deliberately split an ...