WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

A reader took issue with the title of my column two weeks ago. Inter alia, he wrote; “It is incorrect to say ‘Beware of’ . The correct usage is either “Be aware of” or just ‘Beware’. In response, I ...