Here is a sentence whose punctuation poses an interesting grammatical problem, and where there are problems, of course, there are opportunities: In fact, they behaved like an authoritarian dictator: questioned people on the street with whom they disagreed, detained people with whom they disagreed, forced out people with whom they disagreed. The author wants to …
Author Archives: rultimo
Aspect
Probably the first idea that comes to mind on the subject of verbs is tense. In an earlier post (Time and Tense), I explained briefly the organization of the six tenses in modern English and laid them out one to the next across a timeline. In addition to tense, though, verbs take on another feature, …
Questions, Direct and Indirect
I have noticed lately that the question mark is having a difficult time asserting itself. In an email to a client recently, a student wrote I have collected the information you requested. Would you be able to meet this Thursday afternoon. His second sentence here is directly asking a simple question, so shouldn’t it conclude …
Begging for More
In an earlier post (Begging for Change), I took up the question of begging the question, a phrase that has come to mean, as I explained there, something more than it did in the beginning. I received some comments asking me to give more examples of the original meaning, and I thought a few additional …
Begging for Change
It is not uncommon to hear someone say something like this: Well, if what you say is true, that only begs the question: Should we continue to allow houses to be built so close to the shoreline? The phrase begs the question has lately extended (some would say overreached) its established borders to now mean …