My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

Neither councillor has any charisma.
Every one of the candidates is a crook.
It would be completely hypocritical of me to vote for any of that lot.
Half the problems of modern life can be blamed on people like that .
There is littl e chance of anyone decent getting in.
Do you think these examples are turning into a bit of a rant?
W
HAT
’
S IN A NAME
? (
OR
, N
OUNS
)
There are various categories of noun , but they are all ‘naming words’. They just
name different types of thing.
Common noun: a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing or abstract
idea, such as book , smell , dog , parsnip , leg , delight , boredom , success  and
failure.

---

Common nouns can be further subdivided into:
Concrete noun : used to name something you can identify with one or more of
the five senses, e.g. parsnip, smell .
Abstract  noun  :  names  something  that  has  no  physical  existence,  e.g.  delight  ,
failure .
Proper  noun:  used  to  name  a  specific  person,  animal,  place  or  thing.  It  is
usually  written  with  a  capital  letter  to  show  its  importance,  such  as  Queen
Victoria , The Statue of Liberty , Monday , Christmas  ,  Ibiza  ,  Rolls-Royce  and
Noel Edmonds.
*15
Compound  noun:  a  noun  made  up  of  more  than  one  word,  usually  (but  not
always)  two  nouns  or  a  noun  and  an  adjective,  to  make  something  with  a
meaning of its own, such as apple tree , lion tamer , feel-good factor , tan line ,
lawsuit , science-fiction (or indeed science-fiction writer ) and will-o’-the-wisp .
Wikipedia says that English has a habit of ‘creating compounds by concatenating
words without case markers’, which is a wonderfully nonsensical way of saying
that we just bung words together to make other words or phrases: thus a science-
fiction writer is a writer who writes fiction based on science , but there is nothing
in  the  form  of  the  words  to  tell  us  whether  they  are  adjectives  or  nouns  or
whatever.  And  as  you  can  see,  these  compounds  may  end  up  as  a  single  word,
two  or  more  separate  words  or  two  or  more  words  with  one  or  more  hyphens.
But let’s not get into hyphens just yet…
*16