Before 2006, I never gave much thought to nominalizations — noun forms like “beauty” and “the scheduling” that at heart are really adjectives like “beautiful” or verbs like “to schedule.” I was ...

It’s a billboard custom-tailored to grammar buffs. “Every day we help people get back to their everyday,” proclaims the ad for Keck Medical Center of USC. In that single sentence, the copy writer does ...

Maybe your heart is broken, or you want to say someone’s smile is beautiful or that you feel it in your soul. Then, you have noun shame. You wouldn’t dare let those over used words drip out of your ...

What the examples have in common, obviously, is an unfamiliar adjective made by putting a y at the end of a noun or verb. I hasten to say that I’m not claiming this is in any way a new phenomenon. The ...