In my Chaucer class today I learned something amazing—where the word “can” comes from. In the Canterbury Tales you often see phrases like this one:
What ladyes fairest been or best daunsynge,
Or which of hem kan dauncen best and synge
where “kan” means “know how.” (The word “dauncen” is in the infinitive form, so we would write [...]

I was just reading an article in Time about George Clooney, which quotes him as saying “I know what pisses people off about fame. It’s when famous people whine about it.” The phrase “when famous people whine about it” can be interpreted either as adverbial or substantive. That is, it can be telling us that [...]

Every time I talk with my boss, there’s an exchange something like this:
“Hi Matthew, how are you doing?”
“Good, how are you?”
“I’m doing well!”
There was a time when someone would ask me how I was doing and I would answer simply “well.” That was a few years ago, and I was trying to make my English [...]

Have you ever wondered whether the earth actually has a face? The Oxford English Dictionary says that “the face of the earth” is a Hebraistic idiom imported into English via the Bible and attested from 1340.
At any rate, I have some use for the handy metaphor right now, because I am about to drop off [...]

There’s an old joke that a teacher once asked her students to punctuate the following sentence:
A woman without her man is lost
All the men in the class wrote, “A woman, without her man, is lost.” All the women wrote, “A woman: without her, man is lost.”
The anecdote is a good illustration of the main role [...]

[Semi-technical!]
For some time, grammarians have attempted to make the passive voice the pariah of the English verb family. But for all its ill-treatment, the voice is infinitely interesting. Take, for example, the curious construction of the double passive voice, as in “one bookstore’s copies were neglected to be locked away.”
I am neither a linguist nor [...]

There’s a strange little phrase that I hear pretty often: “once and for all.” Seems like it should be “once for all,” as in, “”I’m tired of saying this over and over; let’s settle it once (one time) for all (all the times).”
I’ve noticed many writers who do say “once for all,” but a lot [...]

You may know this instinctively already, or you may have overlooked it for some time like I did. At any rate, it doesn’t seem like schools do a good job addressing the common mistake of confusing “may” and “might.” Actually, “might” is the past tense of “may,” just like “could” is the past tense of [...]

[Semi-technical!]
In tenth grade English I read Francis Bacon’s essays for the first time. While I perused the one called “Of Great Place,” I came across the following statement: “[I]n evil the best condition is not to will; the second, not to can.” For a moment I was perplexed. What could Bacon mean by “to can”? [...]

Here is something that has troubled me for some time: not all pronouns are pronouns. Doubt it? Let me explain.
A pronoun, according to almost any dictionary, is a word that takes the place of a noun. For example, instead of saying “John throws the ball,” I can say “He throws it.” Simple enough. Now, inside [...]