One of my former Czech students once boasted ‘I cook the best muffins in whole the Prague’. That is quite a bold claim – and almost certainly not true!
However, the thing that concerned me more was her incorrect grammar. There are not one, but two errors in her statement. The first one is the word order. We don’t say, ‘whole the’, we say ‘the whole’.
The second thing is the missing ‘of’. While it is fine to talk about eating the whole pizza, or completing the whole project, with places you must add that little extra preposition ‘of’. For example, the whole of the world, the whole of Prague 6, or in you like the band The Waterboys, ‘the whole of the moon’.
So, back to the example and my ex-student, what she should have said was:
I cook the best muffins in the whole of Prague.
With the correct grammar, maybe then I would have believed her!
