Throughout the history of English grammars, a single hopelessly inadequate story about how to define “noun” has been maintained, in increasingly elaborated versions. Throughout the history of English ...

Oh, look! There’s some thing sleeping in the trees! Common nouns are the names of things, that’s people, places or objects, while a proper noun is the name of a particular person, place or thing.

Personified as colorful monsters in this grammatical learning journey, nouns Person, Place, and Thing head via bus to a museum (“a place noun”) to find their ilk—words that “give names to the world ...

Last week New Yorker columnist George Packer noted that while Sarah Palin's syntax is mangled, more significantly it lacks verbs. It's mostly nouns. Maverick, hockey mom, Joe sixpack, elitist, ...

Oh, look! There’s some thing sleeping in the trees! Common nouns are the names of things, that’s people, places or objects, while a proper noun is the name of a particular person, place or thing.