We can all probably recite at least part of Star Trek's iconic mission statement, as dictated by William Shatner in the series' opening credits. Every week, fans were told that the Enterprise's ...

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 ...

Karen's telling me this: She's riding her bike and another cyclist pulls alongside her. "Can I tell you something?" he asks politely. "I noticed you're really working hard. It would be a lot easier to ...

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: ...

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on ...

Not long ago while editing a series of articles, I noticed that the writer had strange ideas about where to put adverbs. Many were placed before the verbs and some before the subjects, too. “He ...

Scholars believe concerning the infinitive with subject-accusative in Latin (1) that it originated in the type iube hunc abire, with the accusative as object of the verb and the infinitive a dative of ...

When you look up a verb in the dictionary what you find is the verb in the infinitive form. In English it’s two words - ‘to swim’ - but in German it’s just the one schwimmen. In German, there’s a ...