WE all know that when a sentence uses a transitive verb as the operative verb, it's absolutely necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: "The woman spurned her suitor last ...

A recent headline from the Los Angeles Times, “Teens plotting attacks tend to tip their hand,” highlights a particularly difficult grammar problem. Do plural teens really share a singular hand? No.

Although English-language verbs generally don’t inflect or change in form to agree with the subject in number, they do so in the present tense, third-person singular. In English grammar, in this ...