Last post I mostly just groused about how little grammar most people know. Today, in an attempt at a more useful follow-up, I’ll go over the basic categories of words in English, which you may have learned as the “parts of speech.” I’m drawing from and drastically simplifying Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum’s A Student’s […]
Dear Language Nerd,Why do we say stretched, fetched, and retched, but wretchèd? -Delphine Sultzer *** Dear Delphine, Because the first three are verbs and the last one’s an adjective. English has a lot of rules (shocking, I know) about pronunciation. We lucky native speakers use them all the time without ever realizing, and the regular-past-tense-ending […]