One of the most fascinating things about language is that we can use it so well, so expertly, without understanding how we do it. The following two sentences are perfect examples. If the burglar was ...

READING a story on the fate of European newspapers, your columnist was drowning in bad news—newsrooms decimated, advertisers fleeing—but then a strange sentence appeared: Even Rupert Murdoch, who ...

Sometimes, what might have been never stops mattering. By Jean Chen Ho I’ve always had an unstable relationship to time. Maybe that’s because in Chinese, my first language, verbs aren’t conjugated.

“If there were a Form 3, you would have already filled it out.” Reader Jessica had a question about a sentence like this. The speaker already knew about a Form 1 and a Form 2. The existence of Form 3, ...