If you survived the American educational system, you can probably rattle off at least four parts of speech—noun, verb, adjective, adverb—and here the nerds among us chime in with the remainder: conjunction, interjection, pronoun, and preposition. Most people think of the parts of speech as discrete categories, drawers with their own identifying labels, and when you peek inside, there’s the English language, neatly folded like a retiree’s socks: Person, Place, Thing (Noun); Describes Action (Verb); Modifies Nouns (Adjective); Answers the W Questions (Adverb); Joins Words Together (Conjunction);
...more
