The Relative Adjective

Go not too far into any grammar of English and you’ll come upon a chapter on the relative pronoun. This device—who, whose, whom, which, and that are the basic forms—gives us a way to refer to something again in a sentence without using the same noun over and over: Her new film, which opened last …

What, Really, Is an Adjective?

Not-so-fond memories of our school days might remind us that adjectives describe things. That’s true, but like so much of what we learned about grammar in our early days, more could be said, and that more could make the whole subject of language and composition a lot more interesting. I had occasion the other day …