We welcome back Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review. Here she looks at the way that the "drink/drank/drunk" verb paradigm is changing, and advises you how to derive "drunk" (but please, don't drive drunk).  Continue reading...

While the semicolon has long been a favorite topic of discussion at grammarian cocktail parties, the fact that this intermediate piece of punctuation has leapt from its place in linguistics to make a cameo appearance in not one, but two Broadway shows, is surely a sign that things are currently very right, and very write, on the Great White Way.  Continue reading...

To be or not to be, that is the question.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way.

What do these famous sentences have in common? They are all general statements.  Continue reading...

When to use "who" and when "whom" -- this is the subject of our inquiry (and the object of our search).  Continue reading...

When I started writing back in high school, I developed the nervous practice of producing a sentence and then going back to edit it, immediately. Perhaps you do the same thing? I advise you to take a hard look at your own writing and, break the instant-editing habit as quickly as possible.  Continue reading...

"Writers struggle to get the right words down in the right order, to put every comma, or nearly every comma, in its proper place; and readers follow the writers' final sequence of words and commas as printed on the page," Michael Lydon writes, "but what happens between writer and reader is far more amorphous, more emotional than the precision needed for the process would suggest."  Continue reading...