A strange example of negative inversion

I've just spotted a rather strange example of negative inversion in today's Guardian. Commenting on the fact that Google Maps Russia now shows Crimea as part of Russia, the writer says:

the Guardian

The bit we're interested in is this:

• In no uncertain terms is the area marked as a separate country from wider Ukraine.

Modal verbs - an overview

Modal verbs are a type of auxiliary verb that gives 'modality' to the main verb, to express, for example: ability, probability, obligation or permission.

This post is not intended to be a lesson, but a sort of Ready Reference. It consists of three parts:

1. Introduction to modal verbs and some similar verbal expressions
2. Modal verbs listed by function
3. Modals listed by verb

Modals also have special uses which I haven't really gone into here, such as in conditionals, reported speech and future in the past. There are also no doubt some uses I've missed. If you spot any, please leave a comment.

Just how American are the origins of center, scepter and theater, spellingwise?

One of the differences between British and American spelling is between those words that end in -re in British English and -er in American English, such as fibre / fiber. In this post I look at five words ending in -tre / -ter - centre, lustre, mitre, sceptre and theatre.

Talking about the differences between British and American spelling at Oxford Dictionaries, they say:

The differences often come about because British English has tended to keep the spelling of words it has absorbed from other languages (e.g. French), while American English has adapted the spelling to reflect the way that the words actually sound when they're spoken.

Oxford Dictionaries

Which I understand to mean that these words entered English with their (for example) French spelling, and were later changed in American English. This change is usually attributed to Noah Webster, and especially to his An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. So I was rather surprised when I came across an instance of theater in a British book from the seventeenth century.

Random thoughts on the early use of apostrophes

Apostrophes in plurals of nouns ending in s.

While looking in Google Books for early use of the spelling fetus (as opposed to foetus) in British books, I came across this, from the Transactions of the Royal Society, London, with its double use of apostrophes in plurals ending in s - species's and fetus's:

Philosophical Transactions (of the Royal Society), 1669

I had known that one of the early uses of the apostrophe was in plurals of certain words ending in vowels (see next section), but this one was new to me.

Random thoughts on task as a verb

A reader wrote to the Grammarphobia blog about a line spoken by George Clooney in the film The Monuments Men:

We have been tasked to find and protect art that the Nazis have stolen.

The reader suggested that this was anachronistic, as the use of task as a verb is fairly recent. Other people complain about task being used as a verb at all. But Grammarphobia pointed out that the use of task as a verb is in fact very old.

Silly unstranded preposition at the BBC

Spotted on the BBC News website

• The three [South Korean mobile networks] are selling the phone now to get round government restrictions on to whom they can sell new handsets.

Presumably the writer was trying to avoid ending the sentence with a preposition. But this is a case where by trying to follow a non-existent rule the writer has ended up with a totally unnatural sentence.

Random thoughts on all in all

All in all

In an article from the Economist about an important new discovery in cosmology there appeared the following sentence:

All in all, then, a big day for cosmology—assuming the results hold up.

I got to wondering about the origins of the expression 'all in all', and decided to have a poke round Google Books.