In order to express a complete thought, we put together a group of words that contain a subject and a verb. This, then, is what is referred to a sentence. Invariably, sentences must begin with a ...

Oh, look! There’s some thing sleeping in the trees! Common nouns are the names of things, that’s people, places or objects, while a proper noun is the name of a particular person, place or thing.

The views of the physicist Niels Bohr on language have a lot to answer for, not least David Peat’s article about the language of physics (5 January, p 42). If European languages really consisted only ...