Trying to bloc out time for a vacation? It'll never happen.

An alliance or alignment of people, groups, nations, investors, voters, etc., is a bloc. Block applies in any other case in which block or bloc is used. 

Odds are when you read voting block, Soviet block, communist block, Eastern block, economic block or political block, someone has made a boo-boo. 

Block as a noun covers "a quantity, number, or section of things dealt with as a unit," such as a block of time, according to Mirriam-Webster OnLine. 

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage lists people among the things that can be dealt with as a unit. Thus GrammarHell.com can't complain when the newspaper, as it did recently, says that candidates are "divvying up blocks of support." It's correct if the people within the blocks aren't aligned.

Among other meanings for block: a solid piece of material (block of wood); a heavy stand used for chopping; an obstruction. Block as a verb means, among other things, to obstruct, to mount or mold on a block or to sketch roughly.

It might help to keep in mind that bloc is never a verb. You'll never bloc out time.

An article says a certain state normally has so many millions of dollars each year to disperse to law enforcement. Unless officials plan to toss bills into the wind, letting cops run for them, the writer meant disburse.

This is a common error and warrants an especially involved entry in Garner's Modern American Usage. Disburse means to pay out, as from a fund. Disperse means to scatter or spread widely or in all directions.

Those with editors are as confused as anyone. You'll find dozens of errors (mixed in with some correct uses) when you run these queries in Google News: dispersed, disperse, dispersing money; dispersed, disperse, dispersing funds.

It works the other way as well. You'll find plenty of erroneous references on Google News to crowds that disbursed or disburse.

One grammar guide tells me Star Trek Capt. James T. Kirk should be reprimanded for splitting an infinitive when he says, "to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Heresy, I say. Would it mean half as much if Kirk had said, "to go boldly where no man has gone before?" Yech.

A split infinitive occurs when a word, usually an adverb, separates the infinitive marker to from the verb (for more on infinitives, click here).

In general, you want to avoid splitting infinitives. But don't go nuts doing it. "Knowing when to split requires a good ear and a keen eye," Garner's Modern American Usage says.

Click on the following examples and you'll see that to flatly reject doesn't convey the same meaning as to reject flatly. Thus, a split is justified to preserve meaning.

Click on these examples to see how splitting an infinitive preserves flow: to always be prepared; to be always prepared.

According to The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, the consensus is: 

• Do NOT split an infinitive if it creates an inelegant sentence.
• Do split an infinitive if it avoids awkward wording, preserves rhythm or achieves the intended meaning or emphasis.

Check out this article I found online.

The simplest grammar, it says, can be taught to a common songbird. That's if you believe research some supposed expert has put forward.

The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

So do these results disprove famed linguist Noam Chomsky's theorythat "recursive grammar" is uniquely human and key to the facility to acquire language?

Are these songbirds actually 'learning' grammar?