A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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oblivious
You can use either of or to with oblivious: The party appeared oblivious to (or of) the mounting pressures for political reform.
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off
off meaning “from”
When off is used to indicate a source, it has an informal ring and should probably be avoided in formal contexts: I borrowed the sander from (not off of) my brother.
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off of
The compound preposition off of also has an informal tone and is best avoided in formal speech and writing: He stepped off (not off of) the platform.
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on
on and
onto
To indicate motion toward a position, you can use either on or onto. You can say The cat jumped on the table or The cat jumped onto the table. Onto is more specific, however, in indicating that the motion was initiated from an outside point. He wandered onto the battlefield means that he began his wandering at some point off the battlefield. He wandered on the battlefield may mean that his wandering began on the battlefield.
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on to
Don’t confuse the adverb on when it is followed by the preposition to with the single word onto. Thus you should say Let’s move on to (not onto) another subject and We want to hold on to (not onto) our gains.
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pair
The noun pair can be followed by a singular or plural verb. The singular is always used when pair refers to a set considered as a single entity: This pair of shoes is on sale. A plural verb is used when the members are considered as individuals: The pair are working more harmoniously now. After a number other than one, pair itself can be either singular or plural, but the plural is now more common: She bought six pairs (or pair) of stockings. For more on this, see
subject and verb agreement under Grammar.
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paradigm
Paradigm comes from a Greek word meaning “an example or pattern.” It first appeared in English with this meaning in the 15th century, and it still bears this meaning today: Their company is a paradigm of the small high-tech firms that have recently sprung up in this area. For nearly 400 years paradigm has also been applied to the patterns of inflections that are used to sort the verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech of a language into studiable groups. Anyone who has studied Latin will recall memorizing paradigms of word endings that distinguish the verbs belonging to different conjugations or the nouns of various declensions.
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Since the 1960s paradigm has been used in science to refer to a theoretical framework, as when Nobel laureate David Baltimore cited the work of two colleagues that “really established a new paradigm for our understanding of the causation of cancer.” Once the scientists had paradigms to establish and overthrow, almost everyone else wanted to have them too. Researchers in many different fields, including sociology and literary criticism, began referring to the paradigms they were working in or trying to break out of. People have since used the term in an even wider range of contexts so that it often seems to
