Who’s vs. Whose
There’s a battle going on in the world of words, and heaven only knows who’s going to win! Everywhere I go, I see “who’s” being used as a possessive — I don’t know why; it’s just plain silly. Actually, I have a pretty good guess about why it’s happening. People don’t understand apostrophes. I’ve talked […]
Subject-Verb Agreement With Intervening Prepositional Phrases
A fancy title for a simple concept. Another blogger asked the Grammar Guru, “Will you please teach people about proper subject-verb agreement — especially in cases where the subject may seem to be plural, but really isn’t . . . as in a flock of seagulls? I am getting quite sick of seeing things such […]
Where Did That Preposition Get To?
I think it was Winston Churchill who said, in response to a misguided editor’s rearranging his words so that a sentence would not end with a preposition, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” [Sometimes quoted as “arrant nonsense…,” which I think is eminently better.] The point is that […]