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,...
A sign in front of the triage station at St. Joseph's Hospital in Toronto says: Please respect others privacy. Stand back. The request is a welcome one, but there is one small thing missing. An apostrophe. By "others", the hospital presumably means the people who are talking...
A recent New Yorker cartoon has a teacher hovering over a child's Mother's Day card. The card reads "Happy Mothers' Day". The teacher is pointing to the proper place of the apostrophe: between the r and the s. The child says, "I have two mommies. ...