Discussion Forum
This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books.
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Latest Posts : Coinage
I’ve been listening to Van Morrison’s “Friday’s Child” for quite some time now because I love this song so much. I tried to look up the meaning of ” Friday’s Child” but onbly found a reference to an old rhyme. Can anybody tell me the meaning of the saying “Friday’s Child” and when and why it is used? Many thanks.
Am I alone in despairing when I hear phrases like:
- “We played brilliant.”
- “He did it wrong.” (or more commonly “He done it wrong.”)
- “He behaved stupid.”
Some people think that there is a difference in meaning between “in that regard” and “in that respect”, some believe that a lot of phrases using “regard” or “regards” are in fact making inappropriate use of the word, and of course some think there is nothing wrong with such usage.
Does anyone else think that the phrase “In that regard” is overused and misused?
Is there any defense of capitalizing after a semicolon? This reads well to me:
We do not sell tricycles; We sell velocipedes.
Learn the difference.
Not capitalizing the first word of the second clause diminishes the perceived parallelism:
We do not sell tricycles; we sell velocipedes.
The store around the corner sells bicycles.
With a period between them, the first two clauses read like the premises of a syllogism:
We do not sell tricycles. We sell velocipedes.
Do we sell unicycles?
I will continue, of course, to pen as I please, but, in this instance, wonder if I can confidently publish as I please.
Is separating two coordinating-conjunction-linked sentences, the former having a comma(s), with a semicolon instead of a comma logically justified?
In GrammarBook.com’s Semicolons category, Rule 5. reads:
Use the semicolon between two sentences joined by a coordinating conjunction when one or more commas appear in the first sentence.
Examples: When I finish here, I will be glad to help you; and that is a promise I will keep.
If she can, she will attempt that feat; and if her husband is able, he will be there to see her.
The AP Stylebook today announced that electronic mail is now spelled without a hyphen: email. Finally. I personally haven’t used “e-mail” in about a decade. We have a thread here on this topic of how to properly spell email.
http://painintheenglish.com/case/4463
At the time, I commented that it may take another 10 years for this to settle, but it took less than a year!
How does one know exactly when a word is supposed to end with -“ise” vs -“ize” in Oxford spelling?
Onamography is a writing technique that involves creatively incorporating proper nouns (company names, celebrities, etc.) in regular English sentences.
A few examples to clarify the concept:
Onnicle 1: The man at the bar acknowledged that he found the job amateurish. Onnicle 2: The SMS said..Bob ill. The rag ate sick shellfish!
The first sentence has ‘Barack Obama’ embedded in it and the second one has Bill Gates. The concept can be extended to include multiple names in a paragraph.
I’ve been trying to find out if there is already a technical name in English to describe it. Onamography is a coined word (Greek origin: onuma --> name, graphe --> writing) as I couldn’t find anything else that comes close to describing the concept.
Any inputs?
Have you noticed that, at trendy cafes, more than half of the laptop computers you see are the new MacBooks? (Well, at least in New York City.) I don’t mean any MacBook; I’m talking about the latest MacBook (”the brick”). In fact, I believe seeing the older versions of MacBooks is rarer than seeing PC laptops.
If these people are deciding to work at cafes for practical reasons, then the laptop demographic should be much more diverse, with a lot more PCs and older versions of MacBook, but this is not what I see. The demographic is heavily skewed towards the latest models of MacBook. So, I would have to conclude that the reason why these MacBook owners come out to cafes is because they want to show off their brand new MacBooks.
It would makes sense, therefore, to coin a term for showing off your MacBook at a cafe. I’ve struggled with this for a while, and this morning, I decided that it should be “Mac off”.
“Hey, honey. I’m gonna go Mac off at the Starbucks for a few hours, OK?”
“At a cafe in Williamsburg, I saw about a dozen people sitting in a row Mac’ing off.”
“I bought the new MacBook Pro last week, but I haven’t Mac’ed off yet.”
If you have a kid and a stroller, I’m sure you’ve experienced this many times. You hang a lot of stuff from the handle of the stroller, and when the kid jumps out of it, the whole thing topples over.
One of my friends wants a word for this (a verb). I tried to think of one, but I couldn’t come up with a good one. (”Stropple”, for instance, isn’t so good because the sound of it lacks the impact of the actual event.) Can anyone think of one?
Latest Comments
Have diphthongs gone for good?
- Jack Yan
- December 19, 2024, 2:49am
Looking through the comments, we must be the only publishing house still using the æ and œ ligatures regularly. OUP all the way, except for this.
“Writers Forum” or “Writers’ Forum”
- Kira
- December 11, 2024, 1:36am
I feel it should be Writers’ Forum, to indicate a plural and a possessive. Some use it interchangeably but using an apostrophe would be more correct.
However, their is always their and never thier. ;)
Curriculum Vita or Curriculum Vitae
- user116458
- December 8, 2024, 10:29pm
If it refers to a load of job histories for one person, the plural would be CURRICULA VITAE (course of one life), but the equivalent for multiple people would be CURRICULA VITARUM (courses of many lives).
“Based out of”: Why?
- user116444
- November 12, 2024, 11:47pm
It’s a malaphor - an unintentional combination two idioms. I could say I’m “based in” or “out of” to mean the same thing. E.g., “I’m based in Atlanta” or “I’m out of Atlanta.” But if I say I’m “based out of Atlanta,” it combines those two idioms and produces a confusing result which could be interpreted to mean the exact opposite of what is trying to be expressed.
Past perfect with until
- irfan7522
- October 30, 2024, 2:51pm
She didn’t realize that she was addicted to nicotine until she had smoked ten cigarettes a day.
This is because the past perfect tense "had smoked" is used to show that the smoking occurred before the realization. So, her smoking ten cigarettes a day happened first, and her realization of being addicted happened later.
Both sentences are grammatically correct, but they emphasize different sequences:
"She hadn’t realized that she was addicted to nicotine until she smoked ten cigarettes a day."
This suggests that the lack of realization (not knowing she was addicted) continued until she reached the point of smoking ten cigarettes. The not-knowing came first.
"She didn’t realize that she was addicted to nicotine until she had smoked ten cigarettes a day."
Here, the past perfect "had smoked" clarifies that she smoked the cigarettes before her realization.
When did contacting someone become reaching out?
- Gordon Stevens
- September 20, 2024, 9:19am
If you knew how much I agree with you, You'd want to marry me.
When did contacting someone become reaching out?
- Gordon Stevens
- September 20, 2024, 9:18am
If you knew how much I agreed with you, you'd want to marry me.
Initialisms and Quotation Marks
- AndreyMops
- September 9, 2024, 10:45am
qweqwe
What is the word for intentionally incorrect spelling?
- Tolga
- September 4, 2024, 12:13pm
Sadly It looks like after many years, there is no clear answer to this question. I was trying to find how to correctly describe Google‘s new product “Imagen”, which is an intentional misspelling of the word imagine, And pronounced “Imagine”. I asked ChatGPT and not sure where it came up with it, But when used in conjunction as the name of a product it suggested “Brandonym”, even though it made it clear that that’s not a real word and that there is no dictionary term for it.
The company 'are'
I'm having trouble with 'woke' English. I don't think it is precise enough. For example: I saw a computer generated message the other day on Instagram. It said something like: "Lois sent their pictures to the Wall Street Journal." Whose pictures? In reality she sent 'her' pictures, not "their" pictures. The only way I knew it was "her" was because I was familiar with the situation.