David Foster Wallace once invented an organization called the “Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts” whose members boycott stores with signs reading “10 items or less.” It was a joke (from the novel ...
A few weeks ago I mentioned here a CNN article "about the president making an unannounced stop." Two readers emailed with the same question. Here's Bill in Niskayuna: "I was taught that a noun or ...
To play this video you need to enable JavaScript. Do you have a question you want us to answer? You can send us your questions to learningenglish@bbc.co.uk Rafael has sent us a question. He wants to ...
The gerund and the present participle look exactly the same but there are a few ground rules for distinguishing between them. The gerund functions as a noun. “Hurting people is a bad idea.” The gerund ...
LAST week we took up the perfect infinitive as a grammatical form that, in tandem with the main verb of a sentence, either refers to things that might have happened in the past, as in “The board seems ...