Anthony Esolen

The passive voice is like any tool. You can use it well, you can use it badly, and you can abuse it right out. If I use a garden hose with a nozzle to spray water on my flowers, that’s nice. If I turn the nozzle on jet-stream and churn up the dirt underneath them, that’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Why do we say, “John goes to the pawn shop today,” but “John  went  to the pawn shop yesterday?”  Where does that come from? German doesn’t have it. In the Krautic tongue, people say  ich gehe, I go,  and  ich ginge, I went.  The . . . . Continue Reading »

My students have been taught that a verb is in the  passive voice  whenever a form of the verb  to be  appears. They have also been taught that it is never to be used. They are wrong on both counts. I’ll speak about the use of the passive voice later. For . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve seen the adverbs  firstly, secondly, thirdly,  and so forth, used in texts that are pretty old, but there’s no reason for them. The forms aren’t logical, since  first, second, third, last  are already adverbs. They don’t need to have the  . . . . Continue Reading »

Have you ever noticed that there aren’t any words in French or Spanish that begin with  sl-?  There weren’t any in Latin, either. Every language rules out certain combinations of consonants, as being too hard to pronounce. Hawaiian rules them all out! You never . . . . Continue Reading »

Some years ago I began to notice that my college freshmen had all gotten a very strange idea. They had been taught that one must never begin a sentence with the word “because.” I have no idea where high school teachers came up with this one. It is like alligators in the . . . . Continue Reading »

You’d expect that somebody named Waters used to live beside some waters, just as somebody named Rivers used to live beside a river. It ain’t so. Just pronounce the name Walters as if you were from Phiwadewphia: Waowters. The dark English “l” was swawwowed up in . . . . Continue Reading »

The word is commonly but inaccurately spelled “forego,” but those are really two separate and unrelated verbs. The “fore” in “forego” means “first” or “before,” so that a “foregone conclusion” is a conclusion that comes before any . . . . Continue Reading »

We in English have an odd and useful tool: a possessive that can be appended to an entire phrase, rather than to just one word.  Look at the following: Il figlio del re d’Inghilterra  (Italian) Le fils du roi d’Angleterre  (French) Der Sohn des Koeniges von . . . . Continue Reading »

The word redundant suggests a wave that keeps splashing over the side of the boat, over and over. We use it to signify something unnecessary because it has already been said or done. It is not the same as repetition, which can be extraordinarily effective. Redundancies in poor writing . . . . Continue Reading »