05 Sep I and Me
A writer in a Globe and Mail writes about a camping experience: "So it was with great excitement that I signed up my boyfriend and I for a night of succah camping in the Negev." That should read "I signed up my boyfriend and me...
23 Aug Conjunctions get no respect
A link to a Globe and Mail piece by Warren Clements on the current sliding-away of conjunctions: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/conjunctions-get-no-respect/article4485729/ ...
22 Aug Is a couple “they” or “it”?
A CBC report yesterday referred to "a couple and its dogs". In the context, it was clear that "couple" referred to two people, but the pronoun "its" made them sound inanimate, or at least non-human. "Couple", being a collective noun, can be either singular or plural,...
10 Aug he/she, him/her
When writing information that includes males and females, the acceptable "he or she", "him or her" can become tedious if the reference is repeated several times. To avoid that kind of tedium, try a couple of options: 1. try putting the whole thing in the plural--rather than "the student...
06 Aug Freya von Moltke: Tribute to a Resister
Posted at 21:15h
in Articles
One day in early January 1945, Freya von Moltke walked through bomb-gutted Berlin to visit Roland Freisler, the judge-presider of the show-trials that had been set up after the July,1944 failed attempt on Hitler’s life. At the trials, the defendants had to stand before Freisler,...
22 Jul A Grammar Blog–lead, lead, led
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...
01 Jun A Grammar Blog–may and might
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...
26 Apr A Grammar Blog–“your” and “you’re”
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",...
16 Apr A Grammar Blog
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...
16 Mar A Grammar Blog–“lie” and “lay”
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...