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 : Usage
Websters says it’s two words.
Often poisons, and certain drugs give directions to NOT induce vomitting. Indeed, I don’t ever remember reading directions that did advise you to induce vomiting. So, this begs the question, are they saying go ahead and vomit but don’t do so by sticking your fingers down your throat, or are they saying avoid vomiting altogether... take some gravol or something?
Shouldn’t that be “The Toronto Maple Leaves”? They’re a hockey team in case you never heard of them.
My boss always says “irregardless” when I believe he should be saying “regardless.” Is irregardless even a word? Since I know what he means and more importantly, since he IS the boss, I refrain from correcting him, but this misusage always makes me cringe. Any insight? I’ll hang up and listen!
How can you put the word “and” 5 times in a row in the same sentence? I need to tell a story. The landlord of a pub called The Pig And Whistle asked a signwriter to make a new sign. When he saw it he thought that the words were too close together so he said to the signwriter “I want more space between Pig and And and And and Whistle”.
Now that text messaging has become a normal method of communication, “text” appears to have become a verb, as in “Text your vote in now”. Once that vote has been sent, what is the past tense? I don’t think that I can bring myself to use “texted”, but always saying “sent a text message” seems to be a contrived way to avoid “texted”.
Can you help me find the best word that covers the same concept as ‘mileage’ but for kilometers:
mileage (mileages) 1. Mileage refers to the distance that you have traveled, measured in miles. Most of their mileage is in and around town. N-UNCOUNT: also N in pl
Are such neologisms as ‘kilometerage’ or ‘kilometrage’ used in English?
Hi
I’m a non-native English teacher. We did recently some work on assimilation of /d/ + /j/ as in ‘Could you...’ or ‘Did you...’
I was trying to elicit some other examples from my students and I got back this sentence:
There is a dead yak.
Clearly, the two sounds meet here but I wonder if native speakers would really use any assimilation at all. To me, ‘dead Jack’ sounds odd..
Can I replace smaller with littler always, sometimes, or never. Is the use of littler ever proper?
I could have sworn that someone told me once that the proper use of one self when combining with one other was “me” and not “I”.
For example, if I want to state that:
“Jim and I discussed the proposal that was sent.”
really should be:
“Jim and me discussed the proposal that was sent.”
Can you clarify?
