A Word, Please: Nominalizations make nouns out of verbs and adjectives, sometimes to ill effect. Two 12-year-olds near the finish line at a run in Rancho Santa Margarita.

We were all taught in elementary school that adverbs modify verbs and adjectives modify nouns: Happy adults sing happily. That’s true, but there’s more to the story.

All words belong to a word class. It’s that word’s type: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners and exclamations. These are all word classes ...