Writers and language geeks inherit a ranking system of sorts: verbs good, adjectives bad, nouns sadly unavoidable. Verbs are action, verve! “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken ...

Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

The questionnaire included examples of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and "closed-class" words—pronouns, question words, prepositions and articles, and quantifiers. "Specifically, mothers in every country ...

People have been turning nouns into verbs for centuries – so why does it grate so much? Brandon Ambrosino takes a look. While many of us in the northern hemisphere may have been away somewhere nice ...

Like a lot of great poets, William Butler Yeats paid attention to verbs. Pitcured: A 1900 portrait of Yeats by his father, John Butler Yeats. Public domain In the last issue I promised exercises to ...

“Many older adults said they feel positively about their lives,” the New York Times reported recently. That sentence probably sounds as acceptable to you as it did to the Times editors. But what if ...