Discussion Forum
This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books.
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I just came across this website for the first time, and immediately thought of one of my grammatical pet peeves: the improper usage of the phrase “how to” in the context of a question, as frequently seen in topic titles on web messageboards everywhere.
ex: “How to get from the airport to downtown?” ex: “How to remove blood stains from clothing?”
A “How to” phrase indicates that the text that follows the statement will be an informative, if not authoritative description of how to do or accomplish whatever it is being discussed. When used as an informal topic title or heading, think of “how to” as “THIS IS” or “HERE IS how to (do whatever)”.
ex: “Here is how to get from the airport to downtown” ex: “This is how to remove blood stains from clothing”
If a question is being asked, “How do I.. ?”, “How might I.. ?”, “How would I.. ?”, “How could/can I.. ?”, “How should I.. ?” - or any of those using “one” or another pronoun in place of “I” - are acceptable. Regardless, as a question, it should always end with a question mark.
So those same 2 examples again: “How can I get from the airport to downtown?” “How would I remove blood stains from clothing?”
Perhaps an easier, and equally acceptable way of re-phrasing an informal question such as the above is to drop the “How...” altogether and add ‘ing’ to the verb.
ex: “Getting from the airport to downtown?” ex: “Removing blood stains from clothing?”
Without any ‘helper’ words such as “how can” or “How would”, etc, the reader must now rely entirely on the punctuation (the question mark) at the end of the phrase in order to understand the phrase’s meaning.
Is “She was wearing the exact same outfit” grammatical? And if so, what part of speech is “exact”?
People use that phrase all the time, and seem to think it’s correct, so from a descriptive viewpoint it is correct. “Same” is clearly an adjective, and “exact” modifies “same”, so you would expect it to be an adverb.
So what’s the problem? Well, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) doesn’t list “exact” as an adverb. It can only be an adjective (or a verb, with a different meaning). The adverb form is “exactly”. So if you take Webster as an authority, you should say “She was wearing exactly the same outfit” instead.
What’s the verdict? Do you think the first version of the sentence is grammatical or not?
Are common pet-names capitalized as per proper names i.e. when writing to a loved one, which of the two is the better option? -Hello darling- or -Hello Darling-
My history professor would not accept the word “impact” as a noun, as in “The first explorers left a substantial impact on the Mayan empire”. He wrote on my paper and pointed out my error in a lecture, that “impact” could only be used as a verb, as in “the car impacted the tree”. Is there any truth to this, or did some college mistakenly give this crazy man a phd?!
While this is normally a grammar question, I cannot find why we use the language “predicate nominative” to name parts of a sentence. On the surface it connotes nothing. A search of my grammar books, the unabridged dictionary, the OED and an on-line search reveal nothing about the origin of this usage. Also, do we know what grammarian first applied this taxomony?
“Nominative” in Latin means “naming”. Do we mean that the part of the sentence with this name is based on, “predicated on”, the subject of the sentence? That is, is the noun “predicate” in this usage related to the verb “predicate”?
I have always thought this an unfortunate taxomy, as it makes language learning doubly difficult -- first the language, and then these arcane names to talk about it. This after having studied three European languages plus my own.
... to describe a phrase where all words begin with the same letter?
Sally sells seashells at the sea shore..
Last year in my college English 1201 class, my professor always crossed out the word “societal” on a paper I did. He would write above it “...you should use ‘social’ instead...” Does that have something to do with context. Is there a situation where one of the words is wrong and one is appropriate? and why if they are synonyms and the same part of speech would there be a seperate rule?
Why is it, when using the construction ‘only then’, do we reverse the verb order that follows? i.e. We must acquire funding. Only then can we achieve our goals.
A friend suggested it was for emphasis, but I thought I’d put it to the masses, too. I had a student put this question to me and could not come up with a grammatical reason. Is it just ‘English is that way’? Does anyone know of any other situations where this occurs without a question? Is there a name for this?
Does anybody know if there’s a term for inserting a word in to another word, particularly swear words? For example: Fam-damn-ily, or Ri-goddamn-diculous?
My roommate and I have scoured all of our grammar books and literary dictionaries, but to no avail. Any thoughts?
When do you capitalize directions? ie) Uncle Henry flew south for the winter.
