WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

When a sentence uses a transitive verb to describe an action, it’s necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” “Her suitor found a ...

It seems the grammatical blunder is worse in the use of verbs than possible in others. It is NOT ‘felicitate with, clap for him, ordered for, requested for, emphasise on, comprise of, ’ etc, as a ...