WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

National Public Radio recently asked listeners to submit their top grammar peeves. As usually happens when people talk about grammar, control-freak impulses nearly steered the conversation off course, ...

When a sentence uses a transitive verb to describe an action, it’s necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” “Her suitor found a ...