The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about English grammar and usage — most of which I promptly forgot. And not for lack of use. Every day I apply what I’ve learned to catch and fix writers’ mistakes.
A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you turn a noun into a plural noun.Let’s look at a few of these patterns. In some ...
What do erotica, stamina, and candelabra have in common? Oh, stop it. The answer is that they are all singular nouns that started off plural. In Latin, nouns that end in –um when alone often end in –a ...
Of all the grammar concepts we have, "plural" seems to be one of the most straightforward. You got one thing? It's singular. Got more than one thing? It's plural. But alas, language is always less ...
Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. Forming a plural is pretty easy, right? You just add an “s” to something. Unless, of course, it’s a word ...
Some keen-eared Radio National listeners recently took issue with the following sentence, delivered on a book review program: "There's heartbreaking scenes in Murakami's new novel." It's not that the ...