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‘She was raring to get out today.’ Cora adjusted her hat over her short crop of salt-and-pepper hair … ‘We’ll have them back in a couple of hours. I’m raring myself. It’s been a while since we rode around the property.’ —Nora Roberts, Come Sundown Like go to whoa and champing at the bit, ‘rearing
It can be hard remember which of these two pairs of words means what. A compliment is an appreciative remark; something nice that you say about someone else without any need to do so. A complement is something that pairs with something else to make it whole or complete. While both of these nouns can
Determiners are a new part of speech. Yes, you read that correctly: while the English language and its speakers cannot come up with a singular gender-neutral pronoun, linguists and grammar experts have managed to invent a whole new category of grammatical function in the last century. How is this possible? How had it not been
Phrasal verbs as nouns Prepositions are easy to identify when they are fulfilling their main function: connecting nouns. But their nature becomes less clear when they combine with verbs to form phrasal verbs, and even less clear when those verbs are used as nouns and adjectives. Just like many other verbs are used as nouns,
The difference between these two words is simple to remember: dependant is a noun and dependent is an adjective. The dependent calf relies on its mother for food and protection. Official forms often ask how many dependants you have. One way to remember the difference is to be confident that (like confident, silent, diligent and
That is grammar up with which I will not put Winston Churchill never said or wrote these words, which are frequently attributed to him (but since we are only a couple of weeks past the anniversary of Victory in Europe, why not have a photo of the inspirational wartime leader?). The joke quote seems to
Verbs and prepositions – or adverbs? The standard definition of a preposition, as I wrote about in a previous post, is that prepositions are used to connect nouns. But prepositions also play an important role when we use them with verbs. Consider these examples: to break: The plate broke into pieces when it was dropped.
This is a fairly straightforward one. A suffragist is someone who supports the extension of voting rights: whether to working-class men, to women, to Indigenous people, to anyone who is excluded from the voting process. It generally also means by peaceful means, such as petitions and similar campaigns. Here are some suffragists who were ‘early
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
Prepositions serve a similar function to conjunctions: they connect other parts of speech together. But while conjunctions connect clauses, or groups of words containing a noun and related verb, prepositions connect nouns (or pronouns) with other nouns (or pronouns). In addition, this connection is usually one that relates to space or time. (There is hint