OF ALL the novelties of France under President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the more arresting is the decline of the abstract noun. In the past, no French leader would make a speech without liberal doses ...

English has a few suffixes that can make abstract nouns out of adjectives: There’s the relatively rare –cy, which turns fluent into fluency and idiot into idiocy. There’s the more common –ty or –ity ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. "Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about," said 20th-century linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. It creates a ...

Michael Loukanov from Bulgaria, writing to the BBC ELT message board, comments: Sometimes there are some difficult situations in which you cannot be sure whether the things you are referring to are ...

Think about concrete for a second -- even if you weren’t already thinking about it. Can you picture it? Can you feel its hardness? Do you see a driveway, sidewalk, or building in your mind? Concrete ...

English has a few suffixes that can make abstract nouns out of adjectives. There's the relatively rare –cy, which turns fluent into fluency and idiot into idiocy, and there's the more common –ty or ...