About a decade ago, I read a blog written by a linguistics student who proclaimed, “Prescriptivism must die!!!” He was talking about the school of thought that believes that textbooks and other ...

When you first learn the rules for English grammar in elementary school, you find there are a lot of don’ts: Don’t end a sentence with a preposition; don’t begin a sentence with because. But as you ...

Hopefully means “in a hopeful manner.” “I hope the boss lets us out early” and “Hopefully, the boss lets us out early” aren’t the same thing. On the other hand, these are grammar “rules” you can ...

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They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules. Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as ...

In the year 1712, the essayist Jonathan Swift put forth quite a radical proposal for "Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining" the English tongue. According to Swift, Latin had arrived at "a great ...

Twitter can be an incredibly confusing service for new and existing users, and Twitter says it’s now planning to address some rules that might make it unwieldy. In the company’s letter to shareholders ...

You may have heard about the marvel that is the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, more commonly referred to as GPT-3. GPT-3 is a “large language” artificial intelligence algorithm that has achieved ...

The love song of a humpback whale sounds magnificently free-flowing and improvised to the casual human listener. But fresh mathematical analysis of shows there are complex grammatical rules. Using ...

There’s a horrible rumour about London Grammar, and it’s this: if it weren’t for Facebook, then one of 2013’s hippest bands would never have existed. Like many rumours, there is truth snooping around ...