Grammarundergroundfeed

I’m an ornery consumer. I resent the idea that I need to shell out for a newer, shinier version of a thing I already have that works fine. My last car was a prime example: I drove it for 16 years until the paint on the roof began to oxidize and rust, at which point I seriously considered just having the roof repainted.

So when my 2017 MacBook Air laptop became obsol...

Here's how to punctuate and capitalize questions when they appear in quotations, parentheses or the middle of a sentence.

Do you evacuate a building? Or are the people in it evacuated? Both are fine because "evacuate" is both a transitive and an intransitive verb.

Here's an e-mail I got a while back from a guy who runs a car service: "I've been telling our chauffeurs to always 'drive safely,' while others tell them to 'drive safe.' As an instinctive grammarian, I feel comfortable saying 'safely,' but am I right?"

It's a good question, with no good answer. Yes, "safely" is the syntactically correct choice and undeniably more p...

The grammatical way to ask whether I am something would be "Amn't I?" But you don't have to sound so stuffy when the ungrammatical "Aren't I?" is completely acceptable. And that's all the proof you need that sometimes common usage is more important than grammar rules.