A recent headline from the Los Angeles Times, “Teens plotting attacks tend to tip their hand,” highlights a particularly difficult grammar problem. Do plural teens really share a singular hand? No.

That’s what a user on an English language message board wanted to know a while back. And if you’ve never thought about this issue before, prepare for some brain pain. As you know, subjects and verbs ...

Like the subject, the object is usually a noun (‘the piano’) or a noun phrase, (‘the big, black grand piano’). Verbs that take objects describe some kind of action rather than a state of being.

Grammar is the system for organising a language. All major languages have a grammatical structure. Grammar allows us to structure our sentences and even our thoughts and ideas. Some experts think that ...