I know: since I’ve tipped the trifecta for the last three years (go back and read the posts!), you want to know what I’m tipping this year. All I can say is that this is the hardest Cup in years, mainly because it is a very ordinary field (reminds a lot of the fields of
Hyphens and compound adjectives We know that we use adjectives to describe nouns, pronouns and other adjectives. But when we have a long string of adjectives before a noun, it is possible that some of them describe another adjective, rather than the noun at the end of the string. Consider these two sentences: The blacksmith
Yes: 31,800,000 people can be wrong From go to whoa is an old expression. Whoa is a word that is used by people who work with horses, where it is used to tell a horse to stop. Strangely, the word had two pronunciations: woo (rhymes with boo) and woe (rhymes with toe). Horses seem to
The parts of speech is simply the term used to describe the group of functions that words carry out in speech and writing. One of the hardest things to cope with in English is the fact that most of the ‘rules’ aren’t black and white, and it can hard to pin exact answers to any
In celebration of the world’s greatest horseracing festival here in Melbourne – just over a kilometre, in fact, from where I sit right now – I am taking an equine theme this month for commonly confused words. There is a third homophone (or word that sounds the same) for this pair: rain. For some reason,