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To expand on the title slightly: all of the groups to which an item belongs directly or indirectly ? That seems to make "parent groups," my first choice, ill-fitting. The key concept here is membership, but that term generally refers to the items in the group, not the groups themselves. A bit more explanation: An item's relationship to a group may be direct or indirect because groups are hierarchical. The term would describe all of the relevant groups in the hierarchy. An example: Fuji is an apple. Apples are fruit. Fuji belongs to apples and fruit. The phrase I need to construct is along the lines of: Fuji and "the groups to which it belongs." Edit As Barrie pointed out, my example involves categorical relationship, but that won't necessarily be the type of membership I'm referring to. The membership is arbitrary and changeable. Edit 2 My example caused more confusion than good. The best metaphor for what I'd like to express is: a child has parents ...

What kind of a term is 'shot dead'? "He was shot dead." Is 'dead' an adverb here? "He shot Sam dead." This is like a phrasal verb, but 'dead' isn't a preposition or particle. Is 'shot dead' some weird kind of compound verb, or is 'dead' an exotic adverb, or is something else going on? Answer This is just like "His design improvement made the car fast", with "fast" modifying "car". An instructive contrast is "He drove the car fast", in which "fast" is an adverb modifying "drive". I don't think "dead" can be used to modify a verb, though it can be used as a "degree adverb" modifying an adjective, eg, "dead tired"

I am struggling to find out what the best and shortest way is to describe the opposite of a legacy system (especially in software architecture, where legacy means the system used previously). I need to use it in software so I can create methods such as: find_legacy_record and find_[opposite of legacy]_record I tried looking in a thesaurus for synonyms of old , but nothing really fit well with my use. Legacy is a good term in programming, because you're less likely to confuse it to something else ( old can also mean a previous state of the record, not necessarily belonging to an old system). Answer Legacy (adj.) means “inherited”. ¹ Legacy systems, for example, are the systems we inherited. In the software industry, it often has a negative connotation that the thing is obsolete (but not always ² ). An antonym would refer to recent innovations, so for that we would use terms such as: cutting-edge systems the latest systems mainstream systems modern systems present-day syst...

I just saw a number of comments complaining about the first n in the phrase ‘an Herculean task’, claiming it implied a mute h. But is that true? My impression has been that earlier all words on h + vowel got an an, regardless of whether or not the h was mute. Was ‘an hundred’ pronounced ‘an undred’? PS. Let me be clearer that I am not asking about standard contemporary usage. I never doubted that ‘an Herculean task’ had an archaïc ring to it. But the fact that something is archaïc does not make it wrong.

I am studying Roald Dahl's The BFG and I am confused by a couple of passages. Context: The Big Friendly Giant suggests that the soldiers leave the helicopter and then drive Jeeps to man-eating Giants' sleeping place. ...the BFG told him, ‘But if you is taking these sloshbuckling noisy bellypoppers any closer, all the giants is waking up at once and then pop goes the weasel.’ (p.179) And Context:The Big Friendly Giant refused to tell the Queen the whereabouts of the Giant Country. ‘No, Majester,’ the BFG said. ‘Not on my nelly.’ I searched online. I found that "weasel and stoat" is rhyming slang for "throat". Is it correct to think that the soldiers' throats will be gone if the Giants are awake? And is ‘Not on my nelly’ a word play for "Not on your life?" Could you please help me work out the meaning of these two phrases?

Is there some rule against ending a sentence with the contraction “it's”? I was having an SMS conversation with a friend and somehow "Yes you're" came into play in retaliation to a comment. Example: Person 1: "You are bad at English". Person 2: "No I are not.". Person 1: "Yes you're". Is that acceptable? I would assume that it is. Think of "don't". You can say: "No, don't." or "I don't." and it is a contraction like "you're". So, is it okay? Answer No, this is unidiomatic. "You're" always requires a subjective completion. (And to my ears, it sounds completely wrong.)

I'm trying to do a sentence/phrase analysis of the following sentence. I just can't figure out, what would “No matter the season” be (Adv. of ...) in terms of sentence elements. And the next question is about the PostM of the NP of the DO. “Found nowhere else in Britain” is PostM, realised by restrictive relative cl (with zero marker: challenge [that is] found ...) or not? ? S/NP P/VP IO/PP DO/NP No matter the season,/ these combined features /present /to the climber /a uniquely varied and demanding challenge found nowhere else in Britain.

Is there a word for using a word twice to imply something different? eg. Are you done, or are you done done? Answer The doubling of a word is known as reduplication . De Gruyter says that it is artificial to try to distinguish intensification ('a little, little grave') and attestation to the genuineness / prototypicality of an article ('coffee coffee'; 'the Woman woman' [from 'Sherlock']) so this word covers both cases. A little, little grave is a truly little grave; coffee coffee is the real thing.

There are several interesting words to describe the same idea: Knick-Knack and Bric-a-Brac , both defined as: Small, decorative object(s) of little value. Bric-a-Brac derives from French and is Uncountable. Knick-Knack is Countable. Apart from these differences, I can’t see why there are different words. Perhaps different classes or regions use different words? In addition, we have gewgaw and doodad . In some languages different phonemes can carry emotional significance. For example, in local Spanish the same idea can be expressed as cachibache . The /tʃ/ can carry the idea of worthlessness. Other Spanish examples with /tʃ/: chuchería -junk, junk food chunche -a piece of unidentifiable junk casucha -a shack or crappy house pueblucho -a one-horse town In Korean, the usage of the /f/ sound used to be heard as immodest* piksali pault-fault confusion bijinisu fureynduli -business friendly (sorry, can't reproduce Hangul here.) Do repetitive syllables have any emotional significan...

The question is not so easy as it seems. Let's analyze some derivatives: abortion, abortive, abortiveness, abortionist. The analysis of derivational suffixes (-ion, -ive, ive+ness etc.) helps to identify the end of the root. But what about the prefix? Is it possible to consider ab- in this word as a negative prefix, as for example in ab-normal or ab-duct? From etymological point of view the root must be OR (from L. abortivus "pertaining to miscarriage; causing abortion," from abort-, pp. stem of aboriri "disappear, miscarry," from ab- "amiss" (see ab-) + oriri "appear, be born, arise"). What about the root in Modern English (ort or abort) ? Answer It sounds like you've already answered this question for yourself from the etymological point of view. With regards to modern English, I wouldn't consider the ab- prefix to actually be a productive negative prefix of any kind. In the case of abduct , it's hard to argue that ab- is a n...

"All day I get request-after-request for help on passing the Quality Assessment." The sentence above was originally written as, "All day I get request after request for help on passing the Quality Assessment." I changed "request after request" to "request-after-request," but was told that I was wrong. Is request-after-request correct?

My dilemma is that most of my grammar knowledge goes back a half century, and I want to give current and up to date advice to new English language learners. The opening sentence of this post shows an example of current, as opposed to, old school punctuation. The adjective, up to date, would require hyphenation, using old school guidelines. I'm not sure if helper verb is a term still in vogue. I researched the term on the Net, but the problem is that web sites rarely give their publishing date. New English speakers making the effort to learn the language deserve accurate answers. I don't want to give obsolete advice. Is helper verb still the correct term for a verb preceding a short infinitive? Answer Nowadays we call them 'auxiliary verbs'. The name 'auxiliary' has a similar meaning to 'helper'. However, we now recognize these words as a grammatical class of verb with specific properties, not just because they precede a main verb, because they have so...

What is the difference between "Hope you don't mind" and "Hope you won't mind"? What could be a contextual difference between the two? In a situation like the following, which one seems more appropriate? Expect me to knock on your door sometimes. Hope you don't mind - or - Hope you won't mind (my knocking on your door)

I saw an article today that prompted a thought. I only took a year of Latin in high school, so I want to run this by some other people. The article referenced a female senator so-and-so. However, I think that senator , with the -or ending is in the nominative, third declension, which is not gender neutral. So, when referring to a female subject, should senatrix be used instead? Also, does anyone know if there is a reason why the male form is used exclusively? I think females were restricted from the Roman senate — perhaps the term just never made sense etymologically because of this? Answer A number of answers have addressed the fact that in the United States, the use of gender-specific nouns is becoming less fashionable. However, that does not explain why a female equivalent of senator has never existed, only why if it did exist once, it might be less favoured now. I try to answer the etymological question here in relation to senatrix . There is no classical support for senatrix ....

I got a question when reading this text: The name of the decorator should be prepended with an @ symbol. Should we write "a @ symbol" or "an @ symbol"? As "@" is in fact "at", I would think "an" should be used to avoid the coexistence of two vowels one after the other. More generally, what is the general rule to know if we have to write "a" or "an" before other symbols like "€", etc.? Is it based on how the symbol is read? Answer The article to use does indeed depend on how you pronounce the symbol when speaking out loud. Since @ is usually read out loud as ‘at’ /æt/ in English, it takes the prevocalic article an , as you surmise. (It can also be called the commercial at , but that is rarer, and I would not write a @ unless I’d already specified that it was intended to be pronounced as ‘commercial at’ in the context.) The symbol € would most commonly be read as ‘euro sign’, which means it begins with a ...

As far as I know, it is valid to say "they can produce music on their own terms" when you want to say that a group can produce music without having to answer to anybody but themselves. Is it also valid to say "they can produce music in their own terms"? Does this convey the same thing? If not, what does it really mean? Answer “ On someone’s terms” means according to the “terms”—stipulations or provisions—which that person sets. “We do it on my terms” means “We do it my way.” “We bought it on his terms” means “We bought it at a price he set.” “ In someone’s terms” means using the “terms”—the language, the categories, the concepts—which that person uses. “In Kant’s terms, this is the ‘categorical imperative.’” I find it difficult to imagine a natural situation in which musicians “produce in their own terms”, or anybody else’s—perhaps Beethoven, when he abandoned allegro , andante , adagio and other Italian words in favor of metronome markings, and started using ...

This is my first post and as you can probably guess I am a mathematician so I have no clue about grammar. I am writing a mathematical document at the moment and I would appreciate some advice on my usage of capital letters. Can somebody please confirm if the following are correct? 1) "We know by T ​heorem 4.6.1 that..." 2) "the following c ​onjecture, due to..." 3) In order to prove the "Mckay-Stevens $k$-covering C ​onjecture, once needs to show that..." I'm particularly confused about 3). Many thanks for any help

Did it exist before The Telephone - has it always been associated with 'sales'? Here is an example . Answer As jargon for an unsolicited sales pitch, cold call , was used way before the 1970s. The earliest use I can find is from Volume 100 of The American Magazine in 1925: . . . I do need insurance.' He signed up forthwith for five thousand dollars. "I suppose you might call that opportunity a 'hunch.' I had no introduction to the man, no personal link of any kind. It was a cold call , and it won. This snippet is all I can get through Google. If anyone can access this magazine, it would be great to get more context for the quote. The term seems to have been popularized thereafter by salesmen trade publications in the later 1920s. The phrase itself is most likely older than this. I have two other citations where the meaning of its use is not exactly clear to me. The first is from a collection of field notes taken by British entomolgist Augustus Radcliffe Gro...

Consider these verbs in past tense: faxed, emailed, googled they are all regular verbs made out of new nouns. Are there any new irregular verbs that I'm not aware of? Answer I think it's unlikely a new irregular verb will catch on today, given the marked tendency to modify/discard even the ones we still have. Of the 312 [irregular verbs] which were operative in Old English, only 66 (ie 34%) remain irregular in the twentieth century. And frankly, most of them aren't particularly well-known. Most people don't even realise that wrought , for example, is a past tense form of to work - they just think it's a word that sometimes comes before iron . You sometimes hear, for example, "thunk" as a "neologistic" past tense for "to think" (similarly snoze, squoze, shat ). I doubt such deliberately quirky usage is ever likely to become widespread, but the Internet at large does still seem to be undecided over tweeted, twat, twot, twittered, tw...

One of the definition of shingle is a mass of small rounded pebbles, especially on a seashore. You can say a shingle beach (more common usage in UK than US perhaps) Is it also correct English to say a shingled beach

Since "low man on the totem pole" is potentially ambiguous (and is possibly offensive to some), are there any good alternative idioms to mean someone of low rank who gets stuck with undesirable things? "Drawing the short straw" doesn't quite fit since that implies randomness. Answer As I was writing the question, it occurred to me that "low in the pecking order" (or "last in the pecking order") could be a suitable substitute.

I was just checking an advanced grammar and learned that the following is possible: It is not that big a deal 1) The book says I cannot skip the article. But how come in "ordinary" version there is no article, it is because it is common and became a phrase? No big deal What about this sentence: It was too stupid question 2) Is this correct or I must use "too stupid a question". What if I used "That": That was too stupid question. 3) Do I still need to use the article? Answer In general, when you use a countable noun in the singular, you must put some indication of quantity in front of it. When you use it in the plural, you may give a quantity or not. By "countable noun", I mean a noun that refers to something that can be counted, like dogs or bricks, as opposed to things like liquids that perhaps can be measured but not counted. By "indication of quantity" I mean a number, like "one" or "six"; an article, namely ...

Let's assume that John gave me a cat . I can rephrase the fact with: What John did was to give me a cat What John did was give me a cat What John did was, he gave me a cat But can I say the following phrase? What John did was gave me a cat Answer OK, so if no-one wiser than me out there is going to help you, I'm going to give it a go: The complement of BE in the first example uses a so-called infinitival construction headed by to , and to is always followed by the plain form of the verb. We know therefore that this instance of the verb GIVE has no tense. The second example has a plain form, an infinitive, although exactly why this is so is perhaps ambiguous. We can certainly show, however, that GIVE in the second example is not present tense, because it differs from GIVE in the following badly formed sentence, in that it has no inflectional third person s : All he did was, gives me a cat * Your third example, however, differs substantially from the first and second becaus...

I don't know how to phrase my question better, but I just want to know if there will be any little difference if I directly replace one with the other. Answer I think we can generally divide them like this, although the separation may not always be so clear. To study is the action, (from the dictionary) " the devotion of time and attention to acquiring knowledge on an academic subject ", so the activity itself. To learn is the result of that action, or as you can see in the Dictionary again, " gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) by study , experience, or being taught ".

I'm writing up specs for a website with learning materials for our alpha testers to comment on. Among others, I'm describing the rating system: the materials can be rated (...) several criteria (such as usefulness, quality), e.g. by giving 3 stars for usefulness and 5 for quality. Is "according to" the only proper way to link "rate" and "criteria" in this case? Can we rate by quality ? rate on quality ? 'rate in quality' ? I would usually just say 'rate the quality' , without a preposition or anything, but I can't really use that in a passive sentence about the materials, and I know that even if I change this specific sentence into an active one, I'll need the passive at some point as well... (please note that I mean the act of rating (ie. giving stars or votes or whatever), not the act of sorting things by their ratings - which is I suspect why the 'by' and 'according to' options don't sound right ...

A special use of “should”? If "should" comes at the beginning of a sentence, and the sentence is not a question, then can it be replaced with "if?" Is there any difference at all?

I am looking for a fancy expression to describe people who have no idea what they are doing . I have a semi-proverb in my mind, but I cannot recall its origins (in particular, I don't think it is English). It essentially translates to: These morons went to war with a wooden sword. This supposed to be a (bit sarcastic) metaphor, describing some kind of situation, where the wooden sword represents unpreparedness and/or lack of skills. Those saying this proverb are very well aware of that these people were incompetent (as shown by the morons part). Is there something similar in English? Edit: Your idiom has been modernized to "brought a knife to a gunfight". Usually used to describe an event after the fact, though, not as a general description of a person's character. – as @Phil Sweet kindly noted in an earlier comment. Related, but not a duplicate: Is there another word for unpreparedness? Answer If you are going to be dumb you have to be tough.

As it is common with people from my country, I have an immense difficulty with prepositions in English, especially with the use of in and on . When the preposition indicates the position of the object it is a bit easier to decide which one to use, but as it requires thinking from me, I still say things like "I put the bill in the fridge", "my pencil is on my bag", etc, even though if I think about it, I would know how to say it correctly. Of course, even in those cases where the preposition indicates position the decision is not always clear, as is the case for example with "on the bus" (you are not on top of the bus, you are inside the bus) or "he is in bed" (you are not inside the bed, you are on top of your bed). Other cases are even less clear, and I believe there is no real rule to decide what should be said; the person should just know it. Two examples are " in a bad mood", "you are on my mind". So my first questio...

Sometimes you hear people use "exotic" to refer to something foreign to them. It can be a place, music, food, clothes, or even a person. Some people argue that the word exotic has racist connotation because of its past history so it should not be used in today's conversations. The question is does "exotic" still carry racist connotation or it has already put that behind and evolved into a non-racist word that can be used safely without labelling other people or cultures as inferior, non-native and distant? Also in case "exotic" is racist, what would be a good non-racist synonym?

I work with Chinese children to practice some English. I have a sentence like this: "What an useful advice you gave me!" However, on most Chinese materials I have with me, it is said that the correct way to say this is by omitting "an" because advice is uncountable. There's also that explanation on internet: http://wenwen.soso.com/z/q92137552.htm "What useful advice you gave me" Which one is it? What about "What (a) great weather today!" Answer You do omit the "an", indeed because advice is not countable. "What useful advice you gave me" is correct and totally natural sounding. You COULD say: "What a useful piece of advice." Since a 'piece of advice' is countable. (This isn't the preferred way to express it: Stick with your second example.) "What great weather today", "We have great weather today", "There's going to be great weather tomorrow" are all correct, because...

I understand that "proper English" is vague, but what I mean is, are adverbs to be avoided in scholarly writing? For example, let's say that I am wanting to publish an article in scholarly magazine for college English professors. Would the readers of that magazine generally look down upon a frequent use of adverbs as "fluff." The reason I ask is because my English professor showed our class the "Hemingway Application." According to hemingwayapp.com, the purpose of the program is to make your writing "bold and clear." One of the ways it supposedly does this is highlighting the adverbs so that you can replace them with "verbs with force." So, what is the problem with adverbs, and what would be an example of a verb "with force?" Lastly, could you please use an example where an adverb is used, then replace it with a verb "with force." Answer Your first question is: What is the problem with adverbs? There are in fac...

An awful lot of people seem to use the phrase "substitute X for Y" to mean "replace X with Y", while I've always used and understood it as "replace Y with X". This makes sense to me, given that a substitute is the replacement, not the thing which has been replaced. I thought I might be able to figure things out from a dictionary, but now after seeing two sorts of definitions, I'm even more confused: to put or use in the place of another to take the place of; replace The first one suggests that the object will be the substitute (replacement), the thing put into place, while the second suggests that the object will be the thing which has been replaced. Is one of these usages more correct in any sense? (I know this is probably a pointless question, since people will continue to speak the way they speak.) Is there perhaps a difference between American and British English? And most importantly, is there any reliable way to tell what someone means when t...

As I'm not a native speaker and just finishing my dissertation in Computer Science, I wonder what style I should be using. In German (my native tongue) most dissertations, school-books and scientific writing use third person or passive voice to sound 'objective'. I know that passive voice in English should be avoided. In most of my publications I use "we" (e.g. "we can improve the recognition rate by ..."). For the dissertation, as it is my work, should I prefer "I" over "we"? I don't like the idea too much, as it sounds pretentious to me. Currently, I want use first person singular for the contributions section and first person plural for the rest. I try to avoid passive as often as possible. Is this acceptable? Answer You should probably consult a faculty member, or look at papers in your own field, in order to decide anything definitively. These kinds of conventions can vary within fields and subfields, so you should see what ...

I need to ask a user to request either a minimum or maximum value. What would be the appropriate label for this? I have considered extremum but I am not sure if this is commonly understood or appropriate. Example: Is the user interested in a companies lowest or highest stock price over the last 6 months? They will have the option of choosing 'min' or 'max'. Answer Mathematicians call this either an extremum (plural extrema ) or extreme value . But as you say, this is unlikely to be understood by non-technical users. I doubt that there is a better term for it, however, since mathematicians would probably not have come up with a special word for this if there was an ordinary English word or short phrase that meant the same thing. I would recommend you just use "maximum or minimum value" .

I'm writing a fiction where inhabitants live on the Moon, so I want a name for them. I know that 'venusian' means 'of or relating to the planet Venus', 'martian' means 'of or relating to the planet Mars or its hypothetical inhabitants' and so on. But, after having observed that 'moonian' is not a word, I wonder as to whether there is a term meaning 'of or relating to the Moon or its hypothetical inhabitants'.

On the very first Christmas card it was written as "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year..." http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/christmas-card-sayings-and-phrases.html In Wiktionary that same general phrase is "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Merry_Christmas_and_a_Happy_New_Year A few quick searches in Google show that many people use it without any articles at all: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Does anyone have a source explaining if one of those phrases is more correct than others and if there's any difference implied by the number of articles used? Edit just to make it more clear: I'm asking for the case when you design a Christmas card, for example, and you have to write the phrase on the card — not personally to anybody, but rather as an impersonally commercial message to the general audience. Answer There's a difference between a complete, grammatically-correct sentence and a greeting. If I was writing a...

Recently I had a test in college that asks us to give an example of irony. I wrote this word by word: An astronaut had over 200 missions into space over two decades. Ironically, two days after he returned from his latest mission, he tripped on a banana peel and died. But I did not get any marks for it (it weighs 3 marks). Is it not an example of irony? Answer Your college needs to phrase its questions better. You have given a totally acceptable example of what Nordquist ( http://grammar.about.com/od/il/g/ironyterm.htm ) calls situational irony while they probably wanted an example of what he calls verbal irony (antiphrasis). He lists a third type of irony; I've misplaced the article I know I filed somewhere, which lists about six, if my memory serves me right.

What's the best verb to express that I opened the packaging of a product by tearing it off? Tear apart the packaging? Rip the packaging? Or is there any better verb or phrase to be used?

Many speakers and internet writers seem to use "curious of" in place of "curious about". For example: I am curious of what he thinks. This is in spite of what seems to be, by the rules of grammar I can find, less correct than saying: I am curious about what he thinks. I have heard both forms uttered so much that there seems in fact a subtle difference in meaning between the two, but I may be imagining things. Two questions-- Is "curious of" really any less correct than "curious about"? Is "curious of" actually more appropriate for certain subjects or certain relationships, due to different connotations perhaps?

Inside the alley I found myself cornered by unpleasant sights: walls covered with cracks and peeling paint, storm drains clogged with moss, dumpsters overflowing with bags, cans, and rotten trash. Inside the alley I found myself cornered by unpleasant sights: walls covered with cracks and peeling paint; storm drains clogged with moss; dumpsters overflowing with bags, cans, and rotten trash. Inside the alley I found myself cornered by unpleasant sights. Walls covered with cracks and peeling paint. Storm drains clogged with moss. Dumpsters overflowing with bags, cans, and rotten trash. Or maybe the three of them are grammatically correct in their respective contexts? EDIT (based on dockeryZ's answer): I think second example is right, regardless of the context. Explanation: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon . Answer The second one is more correct in my humble opinion, because it contains a list within a list. And in such situations, the semicolon is the way to go. It is used as...

Example: The three picked up their chopsticks and started on the food. The scene seemed strangely normal to Naomi. It was as if everything were OK, and her mom were perfectly healthy. In fact, she looked more lively and energetic than Naomi remembered. The whole illness issue seemed like a distant, bad dream. Something that belonged to another reality. Still , Naomi couldn't take the thought out of her head, so she decided to ask. If I changed still for yet , would the sentence mean the same thing? Answer No. What first comes to my mind is that, even though they are very similar, yet connotes contradiction, whereas still carries the notion of defiance. Let me view it from a different aspect. Yet entails an element of surprise by the contrasting circumstances. Yet is like saying to your chum: "So, yeah, that's all nice and good... but check this out." Still is more in the vein of: "So, yeah, that's that... but never you mind that." It's a tiny ...

Doylum was a word commonly used in Leeds, Yorkshire, North of England, where I grew up in the 1960s/70s. It basically means idiot - "What a doylum!" At the time I thought this was strictly a Leeds word, but a quick search online finds it is still used and appears to be very popular with fans of Newcastle United and Hartlepool football teams. What this says about their quality of players I really couldn't say. It also crops up on Yorkshire dialect sites, but so far I can't find any explanation of its origin. Does anyone have any ideas? Also, Hartlepool and Newcastle are some 75-100 miles from Leeds - does anyone know if the word has spread there in the last 40 years or has it always been used there? Someone suggested to me that it might come from Yiddish as there is a large Jewish population in Leeds, though this would only be relevant if it truly is a Leeds word. Answer Yaron Matras , in his 2010 Romani in Britain: The Afterlife of a Language has this entry... foo...

My grammar book suggests that when using words like just , that you should “always” use present perfect. So the correct form should be I've just arrived according to my book. Is this true? I ask because I see a whole lot of people using I just arrived all over the place. I therefore cannot help but wonder whether this is an incorrect form that is somehow nonetheless in wide use by native speakers, or whether it's also a correct form just with a subtly different meaning. Answer Neither. This is a case (one of many) in which the two forms are equivalent in meaning. This is aided by the fact that in English the two sentences are pronounced identically, since the /vdʒ/ cluster in /ayvdʒəstə'rayvd/ I've just arrived is very difficult to pronounce, and is normally shortened to just /dʒ/, which makes it indistinguishable from I just arrived . Since people hear them identically, they are apt to spell them identically, especially if they mistakenly believe, as many do, that ...

I remember being taught in history classes to abbreviate century by writing a large capital C followed by the ordinal number as in: C18th without the full-stop (period). Recently I have noticed on ELU (it wasn't something I paid particular attention in the past) the lower-case c after a cardinal number and with a period, as in: 18c. and 18c without the period. Would either 18th c. or C18 be considered incorrect? I checked online and The Oxford English Dictionary says century is abbreviated thus: c. but no indication if the number preceding should be ordinal or cardinal. On the first page of Google results I also found the Monash University recommended symbol, but without th . In The Chambers Dictionary 12th Edition, it lists both C and c as abbreviations for century: C (preceding numeral, eg C21, twenty-first century) c (following numeral, eg 21c, twenty-first century) It also lists: cen. abbrev : central; century cent. abbrev : centigrade; central; centum (L), a h...

I suppose it would be 'only children' but that does not sound quite right. For example, a schoolteacher might say, "in my class there are seven only children".

You [verb] use your mobile phone while you're driving. It's against the law. What verb should be used? don't have to needn't mustn't can't Is can't correct, or only mustn't is correct? What is the difference?

Is there a single adjective that means "does not use much energy" / "not using much energy"? I do not mean "efficient" . Efficient means something that does not waste much energy - something efficient could use a lot of energy for a specific purpose, yet not waste much energy on actions that do not achieve that purpose/not waste energy as heat or sound or whatever. However, something *word I seek* may or may not be efficient, i.e may waste very little, or very much energy, in trying to perform a task, but does not/will not use or consume much energy in trying to perform the task - whether some of this energy is wasted or not.

This question is about worried about vs. worrying about . I think "being worried about someone/something" is more usual than "worry about", isn't it? Can I use the progressive aspect for ongoing worriedness? For example: I am worrying about their expectations about me. I'm worrying about next. Answer The usual construction in such cases is I’m worried about . . . This is because verbs of perception, emotion and thinking do not typically occur in the progressive form. That is not to say that they never do. It would not be unusual to hear, for example, someone who was a habitual worrier being asked What are you worrying about now? But if English is not your first language, then you are probably on safer ground by avoiding it with such verbs.

I'm wondering how to say this sentence in the past tense: He must be very clever I have seen that the past tense of "must" is "have to" but it doesn't sound good to me to say something like "he had to be very clever" because it may mean that it was compulsory to be clever for him but I mean that he was probably clever. Maybe the sentence "He should be very clever" may be more appropriate, but I'm not sure if this has a meaning of past. Answer Try the alternative: He must have been very clever. It has the meaning of past.

As in, a word signifying 'a little' - used in common vernacular in England, and possibly elsewhere.

For example, you're doing a research for a car to purchase. You get a list of cars with engine number, city where a car was assembled, and a color. What's missing is make, model and price. Answer When it's done deliberately, it's obfuscation.

I've recently encountered these two variations of the spellings for the informal word for "expensive." My dictionary and the online dictionary seem to indicate that both of these spellings are correct , but I have yet to discover why there are two variations of this word. Are both of these spellings correct? Is this simply another difference between British and American English? Answer First of all, dictionaries list both spellings, and pricy is generally listed as a variant spelling of pricey , not the other way round, at least in the dictionaries I have checked (Merriam-Webster, Wiktionary, New Oxford American Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionaries Online). Secondly, the usage stats from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) look as follows: COCA BNC pricey 1421 73 pricy 36 4 As you can see, this is not an American vs. British English thing. Pricey is clea...

A part of an entry about Past Perfect (424.1) in Swan's Practical English Usage 3rd Ed states that the past perfect is not necessary in the cases where we use conjunctions (e.g. after, as soon as) and are not 'going back' from the time that we are mainly talking about, unless we want to emphasise the separation of two actions. So something like 'After it got dark, we came back inside.' is OK. Sadly the book's got no example of a question using the past perfect this way. I doubt if we NEED to use the past perfect when we ask questions like 'Had you visited there before that trip ?' Is it also possible to say 'Have you ever visited there before that trip ?' And for 'Had you read the instructions before you turned the device on ?' Does 'Did you read the instructions before you turned the device on ?' sound good ? Are there any differences in the meanings of them ? My understanding now is that they all are not wrong but when using the...

While I was in high school, my English teacher once used magnanimous in a statement to mean huge/large . But after checking the meaning of it recently , it doesn't seem to mean what I thought it meant, so I need to know if it was right in the context. The full statement was: A magnanimous conflagration is engulfing my edifice, please report to my domicile pronto. I believe that this is supposed to mean: A huge fire is burning my mansion, please report to my home immediately. That is, it was a joke and intended for a call to the fire fighters. Beyond the above statement, I have seen same used on a Trip Advisor Review to mean big, and some twitter posts with same intent. Also Definition at Dictionary.com stated big as part of its synonyms. Putting all this in mind, My question is; Is my teacher's statement correct? Answer In this case, the whole thing is , as a number of people have commented on, a joke. The humour is subtle, and primarily absurdist in nature, in that no sa...

I heard the expression whiffling and waffling all over the place but can't find a definition for it. Maybe it's a misspelling. What does it mean?

Considering the rule that every finite clause in English must always have a subject, I was wondering what the subject of the first clause in this sentence is: As can be seen from the figures, the number of first year students decreased dramatically in the last five years. Is this sentence correct or should we say: As it can be seen from the figures, the number of first year students decreased dramatically in the last five years. And what is the subject of the whole sentence. Answer (1) As ____ can be seen from the figures , the number of first year students decreased dramatically in the last five years. The gap '_____' in (1) is there to show that the subject is missing, and that As is not the subject. Before addressing why and how a subject is omitted from a tensed clause, I'd like to first prove that As is not the subject. There are at least two arguments that could easily be made against calling "as" a relative pronoun or even a pronoun. (A) The entire as -...

A few days ago, a friend and I were discussing how every "rule" of English spelling or pronunciation has an exception, and every exception has an exception as well. Then I brought up the rule of a ph cluster equaling an f sound (as in phonetic , elephant , morph , etc.) as a pronunciation rule that didn't have any exceptions I could think of. Is this a true hard-and-fast rule or does it have some exceptions as well? I'm not counting abbreviations such as pH scale . Answer The exceptions come in two categories: Greek words that were originally pronounced with an "f" — diphtheria, diphthong, ophthalmology, phthisis — but have come to be pronounced with a "p" by no process I understand. Compound words — uphold, saphead, peephole — that are just a word ending in "p" run up against a word beginning with an "h". Neither of those really feel like exceptions: mispronunciations that have become accepted and two words being treated as...

I don't think this has yet been covered in any of the other questions on similar topics . There was one other very similar question , however, it was not specifically talking about the case where the proper noun ends in a plural noun. Feel free to vote to close if I am wrong. What is the correct way to make a proper noun ending in a plural noun ending in an "s" possessive? This frequently happens with corporations, e.g. , "Dunkin' Donuts." Should one work off of the fact that the entity is singular—suggesting Dunkin' Donuts's —or should one work off of the fact that "Donuts" is plural and ending in an "s"—suggesting Dunkin' Donuts' ? I expect that the answer might depend on dialect because some regions refer to corporations in the singular form ("Dunkin' Donuts is a company") while other regions refer to corporations in the plural form ("Dunkin' Donuts are a company"). I am specifically interest...