It’s actually very simple: there are some pronouns that we use after prepositions, and some that we don’t. In technical terms, prepositions have an object, and we use the dative form of pronouns to show this. Now, since I won’t be explaining either objects or dative forms for a while yet, this may not make
Does the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’ really matter? No man is an island, entire of itself: every man … is a part of the main … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in all mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. John
There are a couple of ‘rules’ about pronouns: a pronoun must always follow its antecedent, and agree with it in number. Like so many things in grammar, there are some occasions when it is fine, even necessary, to break the rule but, on the whole, it is a good rule to follow and will generally
Verbing: when nouns become verbs Our language is changing all the time; this keeps it alive. One of the most controversial areas is the practice of using what used to be a noun as a verb – a practice that, like nominalisation, also has its own name: verbing. As you can see, the very word
What is an infinitive? An infinitive verb is the base form of any verb. The infinitive form consists of the word to and then whatever word makes up the verb. In Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be . . . To die, to sleep: To sleep, perchance to dream’, there are six
Mass or count? In this stunning photograph, we use two nouns to describe what we can see: we see two penguins on ice. And these two nouns demonstrate the final way nouns can be divided: into count nouns and mass nouns. Count nouns are also sometimes called unit nouns (in that unhelpful way in English
One of the most widely known grammar rules is ‘don’t use a comma before and‘. Unfortunately, while this applies most of the time, there are a number of cases where we must use a comma before and. The rule really should be ‘don’t use a comma before and, unless it is needed to make your
I have never been a fan of the explanation that apostrophes are used to show ‘possession’; I prefer to use ‘association’. After, Saint Patrick doesn’t own his cathedral; he is associated with it, because it is dedicated to him. A dog doesn’t own its collar or the bowl it eats from, but the dog’s collar
In a word: yes. But there is a qualification: you shouldn’t do this too often. The reason is nothing to do with the words and and but themselves but with the group of words they grammatically belong to (coordinating conjunctions). As the name conjunctions suggests, the role of these words is to connect things and