His action lead to obvious consequences. The above sentence is incorrect. If it is taking place in the present, lead should be leads. If (which is more likely) it is taking place in the past, lead should be led. The confusion here comes from the fact that...
A recent news article on a murder trial said that if it hadn't had been for a discovery fluke, the murderer "may have gotten away with it." This implies that the murderer did get away with it, but the context of the sentence implies that he...
An apostrophe in the middle of a word means that one or more letters have been left out, and so the apostrophe can be regarded as taking the place of the left-out letters. So it is with "you're", which is a short form of "you are",...
In the first episode of Series 1 of "Downton Abbey", the screenwriter Julian Fellowes has Her Ladyship commit a grammatical error when she says, "Of course, I've never understood why this estate goes to whomever inherits your title." Whomever in this sentence should be whoever, because...
The Toronto Star had a news article this week about a man who was hit by a car. One sentence reads: "Those who ran to their windows and out into their front yards said they saw a bloodied man laying in a driveway at the edge...
The dog that mauled the child had to be put down. The dog, which was the oldest of the animals, had to be put down. In the first sentence, the clause that mauled the child is essential to the sentence because it’s pointing out a particular dog. ...
A columnist in Toronto's National Post writes that the NDP "isn't going to win any more seats in Quebec, and it is going to lose seats at the next election, no matter who it elects as leader...
It's very easy, when your fingers are speeding across the keyboard, to write The dog wagged it's tail...
Snow is fine, however I prefer palm trees and flowers. In the above sentence, the word "however" serves as a transition between the sentence's two parts. "However" signifies contrast or contradiction, just as "but" does. There is one grammatical difference between the two words--"but" is a conjunction,...