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I need a noun that succinctly describes the enigmatic concept of something that, based on your tastes, you would probably like, but didn't know you'd like. Anyone game? Edit: If it can be understood in context, a made-up word is just as good, if not better. Edit2: I've seen a lot of mentions of the word "serendipity". "Serendipity" carries too many connotations of "fate" and "luck." This concept would have to deal with the idea of something being introduced to you by someone who knows , evidently, that you would like this thing. Answer While the strict meaning is a bit different, the term lagniappe could potentially be stretched to serve as a word meaning "an unexpected gift" or pleasure.

Is this correct? The person with whom I'm doing the project should be here soon. If it is, is with always a dative preposition (like mit in German)? Answer When "who" is the object of the preposition, as in this case, it becomes "whom"; granted, this is by now vestigial and often ignored in informal conversation. You'll often hear people say things like, "Who should I give this to?" It would be correct to say "Whom should I give this to?" and misguided fussbudgets will insist you render it as "To whom should I give this?" But almost no one bothers with that these days. Note that reversing the word order makes the incorrect grammar stand out: "I should give this to who?" That's because there is now a direct apposition with the preposition and its object. Most careful speakers will use "to whom" in that context. You can remember when to use "who/whom" by substituting "he/him" in the s...

I've previously (and am now embarrassed because of this) pronounced this word "ahl-bite" and now realize it is pronounced "ahl-bee-it." Why is it pronounced like this, and not the way I previously pronounced it? Answer It is a written shortening of all be it , a subjunctive set phrase roughly meaning "even if it is ..."

Just now, I wanted to ask a question that was something like, "Can I get a thorough list of all the parts of speech that a sentence can be broken down into?" But then a nagging voice appeared in my head and said, "Of course you can! You certainly have the capability -- but that's not what you want, is it." "You're asking for help, so use may ." My question is: Should I invariably trust that voice, instilled in students by grammar school teachers everywhere? What do serious linguists and language enthusiasts think about the "Can I"/"May I" distinction? Would they agree, or is it fair to say that using "can" there has become proper idiomatic English? I ask because I couldn't really think of a quick way to rephrase that sentence using "may", and began to wonder whether it was just another one of those kludgy myths megalomaniac teachers enforce on their students... Answer Repeating my answer to this related ...

What does it mean? He can't squeal on him.

I caught myself pronouncing the "c" in "grocery" as an "sh" sound. Is this commonplace/accepted, or is it perhaps geographic? Does this occur with "c" in other words? As background, I was raised in Cincinnati, OH and now live in western New England. Answer This will be a fairly common pronunciation. It is caused by the influence of the /r/ which follows afterwards. In the word /ˈɡroʊs ə ri/ there's a schwa between the /s/ and the /r/ - in bold in the transcription. This weak vowel can be omitted altogether. When this happens our mouths will be preparing for the forthcoming /r/ before we actually make the /s/. Our tongue has to be slightly retracted to make the /r/, and so when we make the /s/ it is further back from it's normal position. It moves towards a post-alveolar position giving it a /ʃ/-like quality. [/ʃ/, of course, is an unvoiced postalveolar ficative]. The more likely you are to use a schwa sound between the /s/ and the /r/, t...

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (II Corinthians 5:17) I'm stuck on the use of are become here. Is it grammatical or is it just old English? Answer It's archaic, but it was entirely grammatical when it was written. Some English verbs used to be conjugated with "to be" rather like French verbs of motion still are. Modern English would use "have become". This also applies to "are passed away" in your quote. Because it's archaic, it's occasionally still used now, particularly in Church liturgies, which tend to ossify language. chart

If sistren is the female equivalent of brethren , what is the female equivalent of fellow ? Words usually paired are: guy/gal ; man/woman ; boy/girl ; lad/lass ; brethren/sistren ; fraternity/sorority ; but I have seen nothing for fellow .

Which one is the most natural? Such set is called an empty set and it is denoted by 0. Such set is called an empty set and is denoted by 0. Such set is called an empty set and denoted by 0. Answer While the rest of them quibble, I will summarize: #2 is best, but you need to insert "a" — "Such a set". Clear?

For the question "Have you got any ice cream?" which is correct: Yes I do Yes I have or inversely No I don't No I haven't got any Answer EDIT: Since the OP changed the tense in his question, I have updated my answer: Yes, I have. or Yes, I have got some ice cream. No, I haven't. or No, I haven't got any ice cream.

In short, why is it not oneteen and twoteen , and we start at thirteen in English? In another thread, I supposed that despite that fact that people have ten fingers, amounts of items leading up to and including twelve were more common because twelve is more easily divisible evenly by two, three, four, and six. Both English and German (which are related) switch to a -teen ( -zehn auf Deutsch) ending after twelve. Based on that thread, so does Norwegian. Could this be the explanation? Looking at other languages (Arabic, Japanese, even a related romance language of French), this doesn't seem to apply, and you'd think that if something so fundamental as divisibility were the explanation, we'd see a more universal distribution across them. Answer Actually, eleven and twelve also seem to be derived from 10+1 and 10+2. Let me quote from the classic book Number: The Language of Science by Tobias Dantzig (1930, republished with nice foreword by Barry Mazur): Indeed, there i...

I've discovered an expression : to go cold turkey , meaning something like feeling bad because you have taken drugs and you need to take more. I wonder if another verb rather than “go” can be used instead and if there are any other expressions meaning the same. I also wonder where this expression comes from. Answer You can use other verbs with the phrase. Go is the most common, but you can also quit cold turkey, or kick something cold turkey. There may be others. As to the phrase's origin, Etymonline favors the "quick preparation" theory and indicates there was a period of time where it was not associated with kicking a bad habit. It also curiously Cf.'s cold shoulder : cold turkey "without preparation," 1910; narrower sense of "withdrawal from an addictive substance" (originally heroin) first recorded 1921. Cold turkey is a food that requires little preparation, so "to quit like cold turkey" is to do so suddenly and without pre...

What is a term or phrase to describe a timekeeping device that uses a digital display medium to show the time by displaying hands, dots, or other indicators like an analog clock would? Examples: http://www.digitalwatchlibrary.com/images/made/a201_400_500_f9f9f9_imageswatermark.png_140_60_80_r_b_-10_-10_all_15_s_c1.jpg More modern example:

There is a word for this in Indonesian language: jayus . (Maybe, it is used in Filipino and Malaysian language also.) It is a joke that is so bad, it's funny. It is often mentioned as untranslatable. I wonder if there is any English equivalent though. (and yes, English does not have to have a word for everything but there is always a chance or we can find a close match at least.) Lame joke is mentioned in some of the sources but it does not quite fit. Here is an explanation: Some argue that “lame joke” would do just fine, but not all lame jokes can make one laugh. A joke becomes a jayus when those who heard it laughed, not at the joke but at the person’s failed attempt to deliver a punch line. Source: ~ Answer I think what you are looking for is anti-joke , from Wikipedia : Anti-humor is a type of indirect humor that involves the joke-teller delivering something which is deliberately not funny, or lacking in intrinsic meaning. The practice relies on the expectation on the part of...

Between these two sentences, which (if either) is correct in American English: Our clientele range from a small non-profit to a billion dollar corporation... or Our clientele ranges from a small non-profit to a billion dollar corporation... A collective noun is usually treated as singular. If that holds true here, then "ranges" would be correct. But that just feels wrong. For some reason I can't quite articulate, "range" feels right. Thoughts? Which is correct and why?

I'm gonna simplify and clarify this question, since it has proved popular: Look at this SO QA .. Where an ellipsis exists, is there a term for the missing text? Observe that at first it appears AA was being asked . People answered this at length . Then after some clarification it would appear BB was being asked. Other people answered this at length . Finally it appeared CC was being asked . The same sort of thing also happens particularly in business - it's thought that the client wants A but after some work on A everyone realises they really meant B .. and so on. (See my earlier over-long edit of this question for an example.) What's the best term for this particular type of snafu? There's kind of a taxonomy of fuck-ups in communications, in business, in rhetoric, in discussion: as DB mentions below, "spec creep" is an excellent example of something that would be in such a taxonomy! What's the best phrase or perhaps single-word here?

I am looking for a word which can be used to describe someone who is very "comfortable in their skin", secure with themselves, and most importantly completely immune to being embarrassed or mocked. Some examples might include consistently mispronouncing a word in a conversation (like "pirate" instead of "pilot") without feeling silly, even though others try to mock him/her. Or more seriously, not feeling embarrassed at all if their private photographs (ie in the shower or some other scandal-like situation) were leaked. Words like "unashamed", "unabashed" or "unapologetic" usually have a negative connotation and do not seem applicable, since the person is not necessarily doing things which society would consider shameful from a moral standpoint. Answer unflappable adjective not easily upset or confused, especially in a crisis; imperturbable. dictionary.com I like this word better than imperturbable for the idea of being cool a...

A friend and I were discussing if the idiom 'rain check', as in 'taking a rain check' could be considered a metaphor. We both agree that this phrase satisfies the common idiom and metaphor criteria when used in a position where it is not literally applicable, that it is still able to take on and express a legitimate, logical idea (i.e. have valid meaning.) We agree that the difference between an idiom and a metaphor is that a metaphor requires consideration of its surrounding textual context in order to have meaning; while an idiom is a metaphor so commonly used that it has valid meaning to those unaware of its original context. For example, a 'rain check' started off as a metaphor in local areas where the literal rain check for baseball games gave context to its use in situations outside of baseball games (e.g. I'd have to take a rain check on that BBQ). Outside of these areas, where literal rain checks in baseball set the context, the phrase 'take a r...

The indefinite article a(n) , derives from the old English word an meaning " one ". Generally this word only occurs in determiner function before noun phrases which are singular. However, there seem to be some cases where this determiner occurs before plural noun phrases. I say that, but actually these noun phrase seem so bizarre to me, in terms of their structure, that I'm not sure they're definitely noun phrases at all. Here are some examples: a full three months before we left an amazing two days an awkward ten minutes Ignoring the article here for a moment, these noun phrases are odd because the adjective is occurring before the numeral. We would normally expect to see: three full months two amazing days ten awkward minutes Even given the oddness of the word order in the original phrases, I can see no reason why the normally singular indefinite article is licensed here. Can anybody give an account of the syntactic structure of these phrases, and/or explain why t...

The entry for " dust " from LDOCE says: dust 1 (n.) [uncountable] → HOUSEHOLD dry powder consisting of extremely small bits of dirt that is in buildings on furniture, floors, etc. if they are not kept clean: All the furniture was covered in dust. [uncountable] → HOUSEHOLD ... [uncountable] → INDUSTRY , HARD SCIENCE ... a dust (BrE) → CLEANING the act of dusting something: I need to give the sitting room a dust. ... dust 2 (v.) → CLEANING to clean the dust from a surface by moving something such as a soft cloth across it: Rachel dusted the books and the bookshelves. ... ... Now, the entry for " undust " from Wiktionary says: undust (v.) (obsolete) To free from dust. I do notice the entry being marked as "obsolete" for undust , and also I remember my English classes as a child where we had a rectangular cubic sponge called a " duster " that we used to dust/undust the chalk on the blackboard, however every time I'm cleaning my desk, co...

I was wondering what "drop the penny", "help get the penny to drop", or things similar mean? All I can understand is that it must be a metaphor. For example: simply trying to repeat things in perhaps a slightly different way may help get the penny to drop (think about the student coming to office hours who has read the book but doesn't get it; just going over it again in different words can help). How to use such an expression in life generally. Can you give other examples? Answer I think this comes from old-fashioned pay phones (or any other vending-type machine, like a drugstore gumball machine), where sometimes you'd put the money in and it'd get stuck, so you'd have to try various strategies (generally consisting of variations on "hit the dang thing") until the coin would finally get dislodged and drop, allowing you to make your call (or get your candy). The metaphorical meaning is thus to understand a particular bit of information af...

Currently I'm writing a thesis. I came over the although sentence several times. After reading through time after time my head started to hurt :P I tried to google it but didn't find any help. So the sentence goes like this: Although that/it is true, it is not insensible since one rule alone cannot classify the entire data. What comes before Although is a sentence trying to explain the bad results from a program shown in a table. What is the difference? Is it possible to use both? If so, why? Also the part with "it is not insensible since" sounds fishy to me. Is this one correct?

I am interested in the rapid rise (since about 1993) in frequency of the spelling smoothes as against smooths . An Ngram Viewer graph tracking the frequency of usage of the two words from 1800 to 2005 shows remarkably stable levels of usage for both smooths and smoothes for about 150 years (1844 to 1993); but then it shows smoothes beginning a sharp ascent and smooths declining significantly. Ngram shows the two frequency lines crossing in 2002. Simple Google searches for the two words yield about 2.82 million matches for smooths and about 4.59 million matches for smoothes . In seeking possible causes for the shift, I've looked at a number of dictionaries. In the case of the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary series, the Tenth Edition (1994) begins its entry for the verb smooth as follows: smooth vb smoothed; smoothing; smooths also smoothes ... No previous dictionary in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate series, dating back to the First Edition in 1898, makes a...

Sentence transformation from a PET sample paper: We haven't been to the theatre for a long time. It's a long time since we ........ to the theatre. My solution: went Textbook solution: have been Are they both correct?

I’m not a native English speaker, and I have a lot of problems when is comes to pronouncing words like archive, archon, zealot, heal, health . Why is the ch sometime pronounced like a k ? Why is the ea sometime pronounced like a French i or è ? Are there rules to follow when it comes to pronouncing these words, or do we just need to know them? Edit This question is not a duplicate — sorry if I was not clear. I was not looking for an history course; I wanted rules or tips to help myself when it comes to pronounce these words. @brick's comment was pertinent. I found something in Wikipedia that might be interesting English spelling for this question. But after looking at all these rules and exceptions, I understand why everyone fallback to the easy answer that you just have to know how it is pronounced.

The context of this is in the writing a technical document. The statement I am writing is something of the ilk: The package then updates the [requisite/required] number of tables. I was wondering which is more appropriate here, and more broadly, which circumstances each should be used. Answer Required is a synonym of requisite (see the synonym list for requisite from the Merriam-Webster dictionary , for example). As for the usage, it is required that is in general used in this kind of context. Compare the Google result counts: "required number of tables" = 25,700 results "requisite number of tables" = 2,890 results "required database tables" = 155,000 results "requisite database tables" = 760 results "required form fields" = 534,000 results "requisite form fields" = 6 results Moreover, it seems that in any context required is more used than requisite . The table below is from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (C...

Quite a few words are mispronounced by under-educated people, or people learning English as a second language. Some words are often mispronounced by quite educated people who read, and began reading high-level literature before they heard the vocabulary spoken. This can lead to a vocabulary dissonance, occasionally leading to the belief that there are two words (the known spelling of one, and the verbal hearing of the same) where only one exists. Epitome is a common example that springs to mind. Answer with a word and its proper pronunciation (and potentially, the commonly mistaken punctuation).

The following extract from M-W Learner's Dictionary comments on the usage of "don't": Don't is occasionally used in American English speech and in historical writing as a contraction of does not (as in, "He don't know where he is going."), but this use is now considered improper and should be avoided. Remember that in modern speech and writing, don't cannot be used in the third person singular . Google Books actually confirms the historical usage, but this ungrammatical expression appears to be relatively common still nowadays, and not only in spoken language. Questions: Was the usage of "don't" for the third singular person considered grammatical/correct in the past? If so, When and why did the "does" form become considered to be the only correct expression? Is its current usage still and AmE thing or is it used as nonstandard expression also in other English dialects? Answer Dictionary.com has a nice summary: Don...

The phrase "not to worry" feels more like German grammar than English. What category of grammar is this, and are there any comparable examples? Answer Although John M. Landsberg makes a good point that "not to worry" originated as a fragment, it is no longer one, and is now an idiom meaning "never mind." For this reason, it is entirely acceptable (and grammatical, since idioms are not required to adhere to other standard grammar rules) to use it on its own. Oh no! It's started to rain! Oh well. Not to worry. I'll just have to make a dash for it.

I heard this phrase in the current movie "The Post" and suspect it is an anachronism. Was this phrase in use in 1971? Answer My first instinct would be that this is quite an old expression, although it was likely used in a military or otherwise ranked and graded environment. It may be a bit more recent than I thought though. I found this link on quoteland.com where user thenostromo cites a source that is, alas, no longer available. It is however, archived by the WayBack Machine - thank you @DanBron for the link!: The oldest use of "above my paygrade" only dates to 1999 on google news archives, from a chat transcript with gossip writer Lloyd Grove. However, searching for "above my pay grade" with a space yields older sources, going back to a 1981, which appear to have a military origin. In 1981, it came from a quote from Navy Secretary John Lehman in a UPI story. Quote: “There has been no decision on Admiral Rickover’s extension (in the job) and it re...

This is ‘English’ toast And this is some posh toast Pain Quotidien offers rye, walnut and sourdough toast at £2.95 for two slices, while Gail’s bakery chain, which opened its first café in 2005 and now has 15 branches and stocks Waitrose, charges £2.50 for two slices of toast. The Telegraph And this is Italian toast. It's really a toast sandwich but Italians call it a tost . Italians rarely eat slices of toast with butter or jam, and if you ask a waiter or the person serving behind the counter for some "toast", that's what you'll get. Further evidence here . Toast : culatello cotto, crema di fontina valdostana . (Toast: culatello cooked ham, Fontina cream cheese.) Certamente non un toast qualunque . (Definitely not ‘an’ everyday toast) Now the word toast is uncountable (aka mass noun), which means we don't use the indefinite article ‘a’ or add the suffix -s . But if we look at the first image, although it is clearly "one toast" that phrase is con...

So I'm programming something, and it has the property to be toggled. Now I want to enable or disable this property. In other words, I want to toggle the toggle property. This property, whether or not something can be toggled, should it be called ' Togglable ' ? If not, what should I call it? Answer Adding -able to transitive verbs is still a fairly productive process in today's English. Since toggle is a transitive verb, you should be able to form toggleable (meaning "able to be toggled") and be understood, even if the reader has never seen the word before. There are lexical exceptions which -able doesn't usually attach to ( beware , want , loathe , etc.) but I don't believe toggle is one of them. When you add -able , the syllablic / ə l/ in toggle is likely to become a regular /l/, becoming the onset of the following syllable. This is called syncope and is sometimes reflected in spelling--particularly in derivations like these as there's ...

Where should the word "also" appear in the sentence: I've been in Paris. Google result count: "i've been also" 2,090,000 "i've also been" 76,000,000 It seems like the second is more common, but why is that so? Answer In: I've also been in Paris. have is an auxiliary verb and also is an adverb. been is the main verb of the sentence. In general, we put the adverb before the 'main' verb, the verb it is describing, and here "also" is modifying "been". In the same way that we don't put adjectives after nouns, we don't put adverbs after verbs. I've been also in Paris. This sounds extremely awkward. In English we never put the adverb between the verb and the object. In general there are three rules for placing adverbs in a sentence: At the end of the sentence I go to Paris often At the beginning of the sentence Often , I go to Paris. In the middle, between the subject and the verb, or the auxiliary verb...

I was wondering if we should use one expression rather than the other? For example the sentence could be: Everybody knows that global warming is an important problem Or Everyone knows that global warming is an important problem Which is better? Which is mostly used for reports? Answer I'd say, go with the tide: ( Google nGram ) Post-c1931, everybody is a loser, everyone gains.

Which of the following sentences is grammatically correct? The music for which we heard last night at the concert was exceptionally good. The music to which we listened at the concert last night was exceptionally good. The music which we listened last night at the concert was exceptionally good. Answer Music is generally listened to . We listen for things we are expecting -- the doorbell, the phone, the tornado sirens. The music to which we listened at the concert last night was exceptionally good. This is the best choice, although it is clunky. That being said, my suggested alternative is: The music we heard at the concert last night was exceptionally good.

Be it that John ask me, I shall answer him. Should John ask me, I will (or should? or would?) answer him. Were John to ask me, I would answer him. When writers used the foregoing constructions, how, and according to what rule, did the meanings of the other three differ from one another? Thank you. -Hal

I saw this other question , but it's not quite what I'm asking. A bell makes a sound. How would you write that sound in English? As an interjection, e.g. "boom!" I'm sure it varies with the type and size of bell. I'd be happy to hear any and all variations.

Is the w in cow a vowel or a consonant? Assuming it is considered a vowel, would it likewise be so in how ? I learned that the vowels are " a , e , i , o , u , and sometimes y ." If w can be a vowel, what other letters can be vowels? What is the definition of a vowel? By the way, I know w can be a vowel, for example in the word cwm , described in the OED as: A valley; in Physical Geogr., a bowl-shaped hollow partly enclosed by steep walls lying at the head of a valley or on a mountain slope and formed originally by a glacier; a cirque. Answer (See Semivowels in English and When is Y a vowel? for relevant info) The sounds represented by the letter 'w' in English spelling are somewhat intermediate between consonants and vowels. Sometimes it is closer to a consonant (namely a semivowel or glide because even though 'w' doesn't result in a substantive occlusion in the airstream, there is a restriction of airflow as with the similar glide y. This occurs ...

I have a feeling that "quite pretty" doesn't have exactly the same meaning in British English and American English. For instance, in American English, "She's quite pretty" is considered as a compliment, and is close in meaning with "She's very pretty", whereas in British English, "She's quite pretty" has more or less the meaning of "She's rather pretty", "She's okay", but not "very pretty", which means that "quite pretty" is not "quite a compliment" in British English. What do British and American native speakers think? What would an Austalian or a Canadian think?

When i first came across the name Ouroboros it was in Fullmetal Alchemist referring to the tattoos that the Homunculi; I was watching the Dub so it was pronounced in English as Or-Ro-Bo-Ros. However in Atelier Iris 3 and Bravely Default, the final bosses for both are called Ouroboros pronounced as Or-Rob-Bo-Ros, both of which do have English dubs for voices. Atelier Iris 3 was released in 2007 in the US (though it was released almost a year earlier in Australia) and Bravely Default was released in the EU and Australia in 2013, while the first usage I heard of Ouroboros in the Fullmetal Alchemist series was in the original 2003 anime. I am wondering what is the correct pronunciation of Ouroboros ? NOTE: in case the difference can't exactly be seen because of how I've worded it, Atelier Iris 3 and Bravely Default you hear a distinctive "Rob" in the pronunciation, in Fullmetal Alchemist you don't.

A student of mine has pointed out that in casual speech, my tendency is to pronounce the word "probably" as something like prah-lee . I am a native speaker of American English without a specific regional dialect, as I moved frequently when young, both within the country and abroad. I'm curious as to how widespread this pronunciation is, or if it's merely an indication that I'm a lazy speaker. Is this a regionalism I've unknowingly picked up? There is a Wiktionary entry for prolly , which indicates that I'm not alone in this pronunciation, but there's no indication of how common it is or where it's most prevalent. Note : I'm familiar with the common tendency to skip the ba portion of the word, pronouncing it prob-lee ; I'm specifically curious about the elision of both of the b sounds and the vowel between them. Edit : I've been repeating the word over and over to myself since asking this question and realized that in particularly quic...

I knew her well, but I see her again when she's 7-months pregnant. Do I say, "Congrats on the upcoming baby?" Answer Don't raise the topic of her pregnancy yourself; my experience of pregnant ladies is that they're very happy to talk about it - in fact, it will probably be the third thing they mention, after "Hello" and whatever current business is at hand - but at the same time (understandably, I think) they tend to resent the fact that the pregnancy is the first thing that anybody notices. (A friend of mine expressed it this way: "Hey! I'm right here, behind the belly!) Don't pretend you haven't noticed that she's pregnant, and - when she mentions it - be friendly and interested. But treat her like she's your friend, who just happens to be pregnant, rather than as a pregnancy which just happens to have the face of your friend. In my experience, you can't go wrong with "Hello! It's been a long time - how have you b...

I am writing an academic report and I am trying to figure out how to punctuate the following: The previous results cannot provide an answer to questions like, what is the probability of X given Y and Z ? , because the precise correlations between the variables are still unknown. My questions are: Should I use italics for the question, wrap it with quotes or not use any indication on it? Should I put a question mark at the end of it? Do I need commas before and after the question? I have read the answers to this related question: How to puncutuate when using self imposed questions in a declarative sentence . However, I'm not sure this is the same case, as it is not really an internal though but more like an open question to the reader. Reformulations of the sentence are also welcome. PD: I'll kind of abuse the question here, but just checking, that usage of regular font within italicized text to emphasize the hypothetical variable names is ok, right? Answer (1) Is it necessa...