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 ...

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 ...

The state of Pakistan is a dystopian transformation from a noun to a verb. Ostensibly formed to protect the rights of people purportedly subsumed under the colonial and later Congress rule, the state ...

A reader took issue with the title of my column two weeks ago. Inter alia, he wrote; “It is incorrect to say ‘Beware of’ . The correct usage is either “Be aware of” or just ‘Beware’. In response, I ...