Zeugma, as well as being a useful Scrabble® word, is simply the name used when one word serves two different purposes in the one sentence. Usually, one of the senses is literal and the other metaphorical. For example: The room and her mood grew dark. The mountains and my spirits were high. In these
Adjectives have an interesting feature: we can compare many of them, and then use these comparisons to compare nouns. Trinidad and Tobago had a fast team in the men’s relay. The USA had a faster team. Jamaica, with Usain Bolt, had the fastest team of all. The different forms of the adjective fast (faster, fastest)
J.R.R. Tolkien, the professor of languages more famous for being the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of Rings, was fascinated by the idea of dragons from an early age. When he was about seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon. ‘I remember almost nothing about it except a philological
Adjectives have a simple use: they describe nouns, and also pronouns and other adjectives. A simple definition is that adjectives are ‘describing words’. If we think of nouns as containers of meaning, adjectives help to give extra definition to our meaning. We can talk about a container, for example, or a yellow container or a
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
The simple answer (for words that are always hyphenated) is to check in a dictionary: if a word is always hyphenated, it will be listed. If the word you are looking for isn’t there (for instance, game-plan), the odds are in favour of it in fact being two separate words (game plan). There is another