According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary meaning of the adjective ‘awesome’ is ‘full of awe, profoundly reverential’. It can also refer to something that inspires awe, in other words something that is appalling, dreadful or weird. But, in the last few decades, especially since the 1990s, ‘awesome’ became a vogue word and is used to mean ‘overwhelming, remarkable or prodigious’. Of...

I must confess that I do not like the automatic spell-checker or the dictionary feature of Microsoft Word. The other day as I repeatedly typed the word fora, a space would surreptitiously creep in before ‘a’ and my fora would look like for a. I tried to correct it and each time as I pushed ENTER for the next word, fora would become for a again! I found it extremely irritating. Yet, as I have learnt English in India, that too more...

Whether the idiom many a requires a singular or a plural verb often causes confusion. Sir Ernest Gowers in his The Complete Plain Words explains it very lucidly when he says that “owing to the pull of the singular a, the expression many a always takes a singular verb”. He also adds that the expression “There’s many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip” is idiomatic English. In Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner,...

I am a reader of The Times of India, Kolkata edition and on the pages of this daily I often find the first person singular pronoun I spelt in the lower case (as i). Since I am fifty-one years old, it can be safely assumed that I am reading English for the last forty-five or more years. In all these years and in all the texts that I have gone through over several decades, I have never come across such a practice. It is the standard custom of...

Can we use the word ‘invite’ as a noun so it means ‘invitation’? I must admit that I was in a state of shock when, for the first time, I read the headline “Barack Obama accepts Narendra Modi’s invite” in an Indian newspaper. Merriam Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary has an entry for the word ‘invite’ as a noun. However, in that entry the words “now chiefly dialect” indicate...