Gave. See give.
Gender. People, animals, and some objects have gender—they are male and female. Some grammatical elements reflect this natural fact, and others are oddly indifferent to it. Moreover, the pattern of assigning gender to living things and then to words that represent them has left odd traces in English, particularly when English words are somehow related to or derived from non-English ones. Add to this the troubling overidentification of some words with gender, and one arrives at one of the more tangled sides of our language (see sexist language.).
Despite the complexity of this aspect of English, the consequences for grammar and usage are relatively slight. Few, if any, English words have gender-specific forms, which means issues of gender agreement are few. Pronouns have clear genders: masculine and feminine “he” and “she,” “him” and “her,” “his” and “hers” (nominative, objective case, and possessive, respectively). And it is relatively easy to match up distinctly male and female beings with the corresponding pronoun: “The bull rams his horns.” “The cow chews her cud.” “The woman writes her novel.” “The man irons his shirt.” “The boy hugs his sister.” But some words for animals or people don’t match a gender. For animal words of this type we can turn to the neuter “it” and “its”: “The dog chews its bone.” Of course, if the gender of an animal or plant is known, a gender-specific pronoun can be selected to match: “The dog chewed his bone.” See also case.
Words that depict human roles, occupations, and so on are trickier. It is clear that mothers are females and fathers are males. But doctors, lawyers, nurses, truck drivers, boxers, and presidents of companies and countries can be either male or female. Thus the sentence “The lawyer checked his notes while the secretary waited for her assignment” assumes gender identifications that might not be accurate and that are certainly stereotypical. Your writing should not assume such gender identifications but should find ways to indicate the possibility of either a female or a male performing the action or occupying the role you are writing about. Use “he or she,” change singular to plural, or reconstruct the sentence to get out of the phrase that is causing the problem. Whatever solution you find to correct assumed and perhaps biased gender identification, make sure you pay attention to this problem and avoid it in your writing.
English words that have nothing to do with living things also have gender identifications that have persisted from older forms of our language or have been imported with words from other languages we now use as though they were English in origin: “The ship sailed at her full speed, but the plane had reduced her rate of descent.” Since these distinctions have their roots in older forms of English or other languages, the genders of the objects tend to fade or become less distinct. Thus it is proper to refer to a ship or airplane as “it.” Adjust your style to fit your audience’s requirements.
Genetive case. See possessive.
German. German has some special characters that need to be represented with care. Several German vowels can have double dots—an umlaut—over them, which distinguishes their pronounced sound: ä, ö, ü; and there is a joined double “s”—f. Umlauted letters are sometimes represented in English with an added “e” instead of the umlaut, and the doubled “s” is sometimes spelled “ss.” It is better to use the accents and special character if you can.
Note also that German capitalizes all nouns of any kind: “mein Vater, ihrer Mutter, ein Haus” (see capitalization). Check a German grammar, dictionary, or other source book for more details about German usage, punctuation, and so on. See languages.
Gerund. The verb form created by adding “ing” to the root of a verb is called a gerund or present participle. (See conjugation for the spelling and formation rules of gerunds.) It is used to form tenses and in a variety of phrases and clauses, and it can function as a noun or adjective: “Painting is relaxing.”
As nouns or adjectives, gerunds can play any of the parts that those words can in a sentence, including when they are combined into phrases or clauses. “The wilting flower, sitting in a vase on the peeling windowsill, represented declining vigor to the writer, who faced the rapid ebbing of his talent but was eyeing many cures for his ills.” Here the gerund and present participle play many roles (too many for a single sentence!): Adjective (“wilting,” “peeling,” and “declining”), noun (“ebbing”), and verb form (“sitting” and “was eyeing”).
So versatile a form has many uses, and it happily has few issues of agreement to be concerned with. One should, however, pay attention to how the “ing” form functions in a sentence in order to match it with the correct pronoun modifying it or related to it (antecedent). Since the gerund is a noun form, it requires a possessive pronoun to modify it: “The writer improved his typing.” Here “typing” is a gerund and a noun possessed by a male subject. Hence the proper possessive pronoun is “his.” See modifier.
Get, got, gotten. An irregular verb in its main, past tense, and past participle forms.
Give, gave, given. An irregular verb in its main, past tense, and past participle forms.
Given. See give.
Go, went, gone. An irregular verb in its main, past tense, and past participle forms.
Gone. See go.
Good, well. “Good” is an adjective that can only modify nouns or refer to them; “well” is an adverb that can modify or refer only to verbs (with one exception noted below). Be careful to modify only verbs with “well.” WRONG: “The dog obeys good.” RIGHT: “The dog obeys well.” “Better” and “best” art both adjectives and adverbs, so they can be applied to either nouns or verbs: “Ferraris are better cars than Porsches, but Rolls Royces run best.” See modifier.
The modest exception or unexpected usage here is when “well” denotes health and “good” appears after the linking verb “feel”: “The child is well and feels good.” In this example “well” is an adjective in the predicate and modifies “the child,” and “good” plays the same grammatical role—predicate adjective. One can also say, “The leader does good” in the sense of performing good acts, but it is wrong to use “good” in this sentence if the meaning is does decently or adequately. In that case it is correct only to say, “The leader does well.”
Got. See get.
Gotten. See get.
Grammar. Grammar records currently acceptable usage of all words and their forms in the combinations that make up sentences and longer statements. It is not immutable; and even though it sometimes seems impenetrable, it is only a way of describing the rules and variations that are in force in our language at whatever level grammar codifies. Most grammars are schoolbooks, and so the standards established are usually those for academic writing or some variant of “formar” style and usage. In business, in private life, in other kinds of writing than formal school prose, we might well apply different standards than are prescribed in academic or formal grammars. Indeed, some industries and organizations have strong views about what they believe correct English is, and they provide their employees or members with guidelines for “proper” writing. Such guidelines are variant grammars.
Which grammar should you follow? Which is right? None. Or at least none all of the time. At various moments, for various reasons, any grammar or set of rules for writing or speaking will be inappropriate, become outmoded, or simply not suit unanticipated needs. Rules written down are fixed, but circumstances change. Our speech and writing change with circumstances, “violating” grammatical rules whenever communication, art, science, or our lives demand a different, fresh, new way to express our thoughts. See scientific language and audience.
That said, it must be kept in mind that writing or speaking without any rules can be chaotic and may not meet with comprehension at any level. In that case speech or writing has lost its main purpose. And even minor violations of the rules can lead to the same mess and misunderstanding. Therefore, unless there is a compelling reason to break a rule or reshape it, follow it with care. It exists to help keep statements clear, concise, and comprehensible. Breaking it intentionally might help achieve the goals of speaking or writing; but breaking a rule through sloppiness, inattention, or lack of concern will surely not aid expression or understanding. More likely, careless errors will disrupt the delivery of your ideas and lead your audience to mistrust the source of such confusion. See colloquial, dialect, non-English languages, clarity, and efficiency.
Grew. See grow.
Grow, grew, grown. An irregular verb in its main, past tense, and past participle forms.
Grown. See grow.