When America achieved independence from England, it threw off many of its inherited English ways in order to form a new identity. But there was one way it was still very much tied to the old ...

The authors won’t be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired ...

Basic grammar books have existed since the 16th century, but it wasn’t until the 18th that guides like Robert Baker’s “Reflections on the English Language” (1770) and James Elphinston’s ...

To some Britons, American gotten is a cute or irritating invention. In fact, it is the older form, which came from Old Norse. “Gotten” appears in a Bible translation of 1535: “Treasures that ...

Ellen Jovin is not the grammar police. She's more like a grammar guru, a gentle, nonjudgmental guide who knows English isn't etched into a linguistic stone, rigid and unchangeable. Instead, she ...