Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.

“Whom” may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.

The most important verb is the verb “to be” in all its glory: am, are, is, was, were, will be, has been. Grammarians know it as the copulative verb. (Many grammarians prefer “linking verb,” but I have to say that the term “copulative verb” impressed me when I heard it for the first time, in a linguistics course during my junior year of college. It was my first inkling that English grammar could be interesting.)