Blog

Which is correct? I congratulated him for coming first in the race. I congratulated him on coming first in the race.

Snafu : Wow, you got yourself into one hell of snafu. Problem : Wow, you got yourself into one hell of problem. Are the both sentences above equal ?

This question was asked and closed last year as general reference. However, it did not attract the caliber of answer I expected it to. I suggested the following content as an edit , but it was rejected for "changing too much" (even though I believe "the original meaning or intent of the post" was well preserved). Additionally, "what is the correct abbreviation for millions, billions and trillions in a financial context?" touches on the topic from a financial news writing perspective without touching on financial documents . And this question admits to the commonness of M and MM , but merely concludes not to mix the two. Therefore, I am posting this question because I believe it would benefit from a canonical, thorough answer. It is a common accounting practice to use Roman Numeral suffixes to abbreviate numbers that are in the thousands and millions. See this google search , which includes this article 1 as the most authoritative explanation. The Rom

What's a word for a passionate person? Like a "passionista", but that of course already has another meaning. Someone that generally has strong desires, goals, or convictions, and works hard to make them a reality or prove their point. Just to be clear, I'm looking for a general term for such a person (which should be a noun, of course). If no such word exists, then a clever neologism would be acceptable.

Authentic means: “of undisputed origin, made or done in a traditional way”. But I’m confused because every product made had some origin from a previous product or idea. The way I see it, buy authentic actually just means buy real but why should people buy real? So, what does it mean to buy authentic ?

My friend and I had an argument about whether this sentence required a comma: I understand where you're coming from but I disagree. My friend insisted that there should be a comma before "but": I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree. From my point of view, while grammatically correct, the addition of a comma is not necessary . When I looked online for sources to answer our disagreement, I found no authoritative sources and many sources were contradicting one another. Some argued, like I believe, that it's not necessary because the addition of comma is of no value in that context (i.e. the addition of comma doesn't make the sentence easier to read) but others said it was mandatory. So, which is it? Is a comma necessary before a conjunction?

For example, given a common saying or sequence of words, like A picture is worth a thousand words One reverses the order and obtains A word is worth a thousand pictures Is there a name for this kind of wordplay/whatever it is? I seem to hear them all the time, I can give more examples if needed. Answer An inversion such as "a word is worth a thousand pictures" is described as an implied chiasmus by Wordsmith.org founder, Anu Garg , here , quoting these immortal words of Kermit the Frog: Time's fun when you're having flies. A chiasmus is "a rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structures." In the link, which is well worth reading, the examples of the inversion are of the sort: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." So the implied chiasmus would be simply the second part, where the first (unspoken) one is the better known aphorism ("time flies when you're having fun" or "

Should I use the second "will" in constructions like this one: "it will definitely help you and will make the text more readable" And should I write "to" before every infinitive in enumeration, or only before the first one, e.g. "it helps to develop and test" or "it helps to develop and to test"? Could this example be influenced by the fact that "help" can go with to-invinitive and bare infinitive, and with other verbs the rule would be different?

This is often credited to Wayne Gretzky, but I have some serious doubts that this is the original. So, 2 questions here: 1.) Was Wayne Gretzky really the first to say this? 2.) What is an older, often used metaphor that means the same thing? Answer Wayne Gretzky appears to be the original attributed source of this particular expression, although two older sports-related expression say much the same thing: "You can't score if you don't shoot" and "You can't hit the ball if you don't swing." Here are the entries for those three expressions in Charles Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder & Fred Shapiro, The [Yale] Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012): You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take. 1991 Burton W. Kanter, "AARP—Asset Accumulation, Retention and Protection," Taxes 69: 717: "Wayne Gretzky, relating the comment of one of his early coaches who, frustrated by his lack of scoring in an important game told him, 'You miss 100%

We can say ‘fried fish’, ‘baked potato’ or ‘minced pork’ using past participles for modifiers. However, ‘roast’ is different - either ‘roast duck’ or ‘roasted duck’ works, it seems to me. How should we analyze this? Is ‘roast’ a noun modifying a noun here, or is it a different form of the past participle? (According to freedictionary.com, in Middle English the past participle was ‘roste’ – does that mean that this was once a strong verb?) Answer Inconsistent treatment of "roast" and "roasted" goes back many years. In Mrs. Frazer, The Practice of Cookery, Pastry, Pickling, Preserving, &c (1791), the author's names for the roasts listed in a four-page "Bill of Fare" section (comprising suggested dinners of from five to seventeen dishes each) are inconsistent. Here is how Mrs. Frazer identifies the roasts mentioned in her menus: "Roast of Beef," "Roast Mutton," "Roasted Fowls," "Roasted Hare," "Roasted Du

Suppose I put a coin on a table. I can do this in two ways: heads up or heads down. Question : How many choices do I make? It looks like I have one choice in the sense of having one decision . But, at the same time, I have two options (which is a synonym for "choice"; ref. Wiktionary , Thesaurus.com ), so we could also say that I have two choices too. This grammatical situation arises frequently in combinatorial mathematics; some random examples are When you have n things to choose from ... you have n choices each time! -- MathsIsFun.com and You can count the number of permutations of a set of n elements in the following way: there are n choices for the first item, then (n-1) choices for the second item, and after choosing those two, (n-2) choices for the third item, and so on. -- Albyn Jones In both of these cases, there is a single decision to be made at each step, but there are (in general) multiple options. Answer What's the problem? Choice has two related but diff

There is a great chasm on these phrases in the US. The great divide seems to be currently centered at the age of 40. The younger generation has began shifting to "on accident" for unknown reasons. What is your view? Answer "On accident" (meaning "accidentally") does seem to be an unusual usage that frequently appears in opposition to the much more idiomatic "on purpose" (meaning "purposefully"). These are the kinds of idioms commonly used by e.g. children in explaining why something has gone wrong: —"You broke my toy on purpose!" —"No, it was on accident!". A quick survey of the 34 incidences of "on accident" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English show about half have the sense discussed here, and "on accident" does occur in opposition to "on purpose": HAAS: That happens in so many cases where you're got misinformation that's either leaked on accident or on purpose. — f

I had assumed that " hi " was a somehow abbreviated form of " hello ," but though both of these words appear to have originated from a noise to attract attention, hi actually predates hello . These words both appeared in the mid- to late 1800s, and seem to be primarily American usage. Does anyone know what Americans used for greetings prior to this time period? Update on 9/10/11 : Although I have come to feel that "how do ye" and its variant "howdy" are most likely the common greetings in the early days of America, part of the difficulty in assessing this is the lack of recorded everyday speech. I was also unaware that "howdy" was used anywhere other than the US South prior to the 1800s, but the OED begs to differ (if someone has the citation for this, please feel free to link it). There was considerable discussion in chat about the problem of researching common conversational speech, and during the course of that discussion, I realize

In written English (mainly online) I often come across sentences ending with a question or an exclamation mark with a space before it. Is it always just an error or a typo? Or there are cases when it is a correct English, for example after closing parentheses or some other punctuation marks? Answer In English, it is always an error. There should be no space between a sentence and its ending punctuation, whether that's a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark. There should also be no space before a colon, semicolon, or comma. The only ending punctuation mark that sometimes needs to be preceded by a space is a dash. I see this error most often with people who never really learned to type. In handwriting, spacing is more, um, negotiable and subject to interpretation.

Is there a word or expression in English, which describes the situation, when you can't pass a stranger, who is walking towards you on the street, because you both start to step the same direction? I'm pretty sure I've heard one once. As I remember, it was including "dancing" reference, but in more specific way.

In my youth magazines were often shared amongst the older boys that had been taken either from parents or from the local drugstore. These magazines often featured blonde bombshells on the covers that looked as if they were not wearing any clothes, but positioned in an angle where the reader would be unable to see the naughty bits. I was curious as to what the terminology for these kinds of photos were, if you please. An old chap has let me know they are called risque photos, but I'm not too sure what that means even if it does sound the slightest like what I am looking for. For note, this question was made entirely for research purposes. Answer I think you are looking for glamour photography . It is also used as a euphemism for erotic photography and until late 20th century, it was referred to as erotic photography. Glamour photography is a genre of photography in which the subjects, usually female, are portrayed in erotic or exciting ways ranging from fully clothed to nude but i

English has two grammatical categories of number. One is the singular, and the other is the plural. Many nouns in English have different singular and plural forms. When nouns are borrowed from other languages into English, the plural form in the source language comes with it (at least sometimes). However, not all languages have the same grammatical number categories that English has. I think that some don't decline at all for number. Some have more categories, like the dual and the trial[1]. If you import a noun from a language with more categories, do you use any different dual, trial, etc. forms that the noun has in the source language? What about if you import a noun from a language that doesn't have grammatical number? Do you decline it for number using English's "default" -s/-es scheme? This is mostly or entirely contrived (currently, anyway). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number#Types_of_number Answer td,dr: Just use English rules — unless

When should I use “a” versus “an” in front of a word beginning with the letter h? Why do we say an historical but a history ? This question was originally posed by @shanselman on Twitter .

Does a word exist for a person who has lost faith? I am looking for a single word that represents a person who lost faith, e.g. in religion, humanity, himself. The more general, the better. Answer if by losing faith you mean the person does not believe anymore, then the word that comes to mind is 'apostate' - someone who renounces/abandons his a religious or political belief or principle. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/apostate

If there is a noun, then parenthesis or a comma, where should a 's go? For example: The dog (who was very big)'s ears perked up. or The dog's (who was very big) ears perked up. or The dog's, who was very big, ears perked up. or maybe just: The very big dog's ears perked up. Answer Your first one is questionable. Your second two are justifiable, but awkward. They're probably the closest thing to an answer to the question of "what is the correct way to use a parenthetical clause about a subject while using the subject in the genitive?" but they're still awkward. Your last does the best by rephrasing to make the issue go away. So too would: The dog's ears perked up. In-between those two ways of avoiding the issue entirely would be: The dog's ears (he was very big) perked up. The dog's ears (and he was very big) perked up. The dog's ears perked up. He was very big.

A Japanese person said that it is often normal to talk about oneself in the third person in English. This is what he wrote: For example, when you write a CV or an introduction of yourself, the formal way is to refer to yourself in third person. The same is in academic paper. Do you think this is true?

"What do children aged/ages 5 to 11 years old know about the sun?" I truly believe there is something a tad... non-normative about constructions like "children ages 5 to 11 years old " or "children aged 5 to 11 years old ". Isn't that redundant? Shouldn't it read "children aged/ages 5 to 11"?

This verb is used in expressions such as “I’ll see you later – gotta book now”. Dictionary.com has: Slang. b. to leave; depart: I’m bored with this party, let’s book. ¹ Anybody know the origin of this slang term? Answer Recent internet This use of book is definitely earlier than the 1990s. Two posters on Ask MetaFilter date it to the 1960s: “Booking it” has been slang for running away (from trouble or a tight situation) for as long as I remember. I am talking late ’60s Boston … Thirding (or something) the not-a-Mass thing, it was in wide use in California in the 60s. Some 10 remember it from the 1970s, and around 15 from 1980s. From The Phrase Finder : A couple of references associate “book it” meaning to move fast with “book it” meaning to study or “hit the books”. ( Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner by Geneva Smitherman, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1994; and Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang , Volume 1, A–G by J.E. Lighter, Rando

To concatenate means to string together different things. Concatenating "snow" and "ball" produces "snowball." But what would the opposite action be? What is the name of the action used to derive two words from one? (My dictionaries don't list any antonyms, and Googling revealed how to do the opposite but not what it's called.) Edit: I had programming parlance in mind, so I've reflected that in the question title. Answer Looking strictly at the Latin roots of concatenate : concatenare , from Latin com - + catenare , to chain [MW] com- is the Latin prefix meaning " together, with ." dis- is the Latin prefix meaning " apart ." ( de- means " down or away from ," so you can make the case for that as well.) So: discatenate , or decatenate . Edit: As I (and FF) noted in a comment, decatenate is used in biology/biochemistry to describe the unlinking of a chain of chemical elements.

In what contexts are those two words used? It's been a while since I've read the grammar books and I don't exactly remember the definitions of a few terms like adjective, so I would really appreciate it if the answers didn't leave it off by saying x is verb and y is adjective - I learn more by practical examples. Please do mention similar words as well. Answer Advise is a verb, so it is used to indicate an action. So for instance: I advise you to do xyz. Advice is a noun that derives from advise . So you would use it as the subject or the object of your sentence. My advice is to do xyz. The best advice I can give you is to do xyz.

I live in the UK and I mostly hear people saying Don't you... , but some people say: Do you not... ? What is the difference and which one is more correct? You can put any example really. Something like: Do you not like to come to school with me? Don't you like to come to school with me? Answer Both are correct. What was originally just a contraction of "do not" has become a word in itself, and can now be placed where the two separate words can't. Both "Don't you..." and "Do you not..." are correct, but you can't re-expand "Don't you..." into "Do not you...". The meaning of the two are the same, but "Do you not..." is considered more formal in some situations.

I am discussing San Francisco's "Indian Summer" and happen to be surrounded by people from India (the country). As I was speaking I got terribly uncomfortable thinking I was offending someone, (there also is a person of Cherokee heritage behind me). Is there any chance that me calling the weather an "Indian Summer" would offend anyone?

How do we differentiate the use of "no", "not" and "none" ? I do not have a chair I do no have a chair I have no a chair I have none a chair Answer Of your example sentences, only the first one will be seen as correct by everyone. NOT Use it to negate a verb , as in these sentences: I am working => I am not working. That door is blue => That door is not blue. In simple verb tenses you have to add the verb do as well: I love watching movies => I do not love watching movies. I watched a movie last night. => I did not watch a movie last night. You can use not to negate an adjective or an adverb . Usually this happens when we "leave out" a verb in some way: How did it go? Not well. [It did not go well] I would describe that idea as " not very smart". [The idea is not very smart.] Not a can be used in some cases instead of no , but these are usually idiomatic expressions: He has not a care in the world. NO The opposit

I stumbled upon this phrase in this video 's description. A few words about this masterpiece: Brahms began composing this piece in 1854 and finished it in 1876. The reasons for delaying finishing it are probably two . First, Brahms' self-critical fastidiousness, and secondly, the expectation from Brahms' friends and the public that he would continue "Beethoven's inheritance" and produce a symphony of commensurate dignity and intellectual scope, an expectation that Brahms felt he could not fulfill easily in view of the monumental reputation of Beethoven. Is this grammatically correct? Can a numeral be a predicative in plural stating the number of the objects that are denoted by the grammatical subject? Could one say, for example The pens are two, not three. instead of There are two pens, not three. If the sentence from the video description is correct English, while my example is not, please explain the difference. Answer The original sentence is grammatically

I hope this is a valid question to ask. I wondered about the different expressions one can use for heavy or unstable breathing. Rather than being heavy breathing from exercising, it's heavy, laboured breathing due to negative emotions. Would these work ? : "uneven breath/breathing" "quickening breath" Is there also an expression or phrasing to implement a "breathing that's growing... [rasp/laboured/winded] ? Are there other expressions to describe the following statement "her pulse quickened". I assume it depends on context, but does this expression implies a positive source or a negative one ? In terms of regular breathing, can one qualify someone's breath of "steady", or "quite steady" ? Essentially, how does one breathe in English ?

Example: Pedro was standing on my left, his hair [...], watching the rocks being beaten endlessly by the waves. I'm curious, is there a word that means being blown by the wind?

PREMISE: I am not asking about the difference in meaning or usage between latter and later ; it is, therefore, not a duplicate of the older question: what is the difference between later and latter? Instead, I would like to understand more about its history and why it is rarely used as the comparative adjective of late , and, finally, if the superlative “the most latter” ever existed. According to Wiktionary, latter is not comparable. Latter Adjective latter (not comparable) Relating to or being the second of two items. Near (or nearer) to the end. Close (or closer) to the present time. In fact, “more latter” or “lattermore” are nonexistent as is “most latter” but “lattermost” is cited in all the major dictionaries, English Oxford Dictionaries defines it as: Nearest to the end, final, last although it fails to mention that it is a superlative. I admit to feeling confused, and I would argue that the following examples are using latter as a comparative adjective. I prefer his lat

Where does the phrase "to wash up" (equally "to clean up") originate from? Particularly the word "up", how did that enter the phrase? Answer Both wash up and clean up are phrasal verbs, which are very common in English. These verbs then to share a common etymology: old english verbs with separable preposition prefixes. Suite101 has a nice write-up: Phrasal verbs in Modern English developed from verbs with separable preposition prefixes in Old English. Verbs with separable preposition prefixes still exist in Modern German and Modern Dutch. For example, the Modern German verb aufwachen "to wake up" consists of the verb wachen and the preposition prefix auf. When the verb is conjugated, the preposition prefix moves to the end of the predicate phrase as in ich wache auf "I wake up." Old English verbs with separable preposition prefixes evolved into phrasal verbs in which the preposition follows the verb in Middle English.

This is something that has bothered me for a long time. Several years ago a remember noticing in the media a shift from using "An operation" to "A surgery" when talking about someone who was undergoing a medical procedure. Now, to my ears "A surgery" sounded patently wrong. To me it sounded a lot like saying "A water". In the sense of 'medical procedure', surgery is a mass noun to me, and using it as a count noun is ungrammatical. I'm entirely prepared to be told to go away and stop being so ridiculous. This could all, in the end, entirely be the ramblings of someone who sees the English language in his own peculiar way. But is it just me? Is "a surgery" a legitimate and commonly accepted use of the word? Answer I find three definitions of surgery in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) for which the plural surgeries seems eminently reasonable: 3 a Brit : a physician's or dentist's offi

I'm not sure if(or, whether) we can do it. Can this sentence be written in this way... I'm not sure can we do it. Can whether , or if , be omitted like that and still be understandable? Thanks. Answer Consider first this question on omitting "that" from a sentence . As the answer says, we can omit it when it is used as a subordinating conjugation, though there are some cases where it remains either necessary or clearer ( this article has more advice on that ). Now, having considered that, consider that when we change from: She told me that it was okay. To: She told me it was okay. In the result we don't really have an omitted that . What we have is an independent and a dependent clause conjoined together by nothing. Granted in this case that is the only English word that could do the job, but that doesn't really make any difference; if English had a million such words, or if someone's idiolect meant they often used que there, the result would be the sam

Is there a rule about double negations that aren't meant as double negations (e.g. “We don't need no education”)? Double negation   I'm not a native English speaker, and this question may be very basic, but I want to learn English better, so don't hurt me with downvotes. What is the difference between "I don't know nothing" and "I don't know anything"? Do they have the same meaning or opposite ones? Answer There is no semantic difference between these two: I know nothing about that. I don’t know nothin’ about that. The difference is one of register alone, where the first is standard English and the second is perfectly common but far more casual, and is not generally considered acceptable in formal writing save as reported speech. Please note that the second one is not a double negative, for if it were, it would be a positive! And it’s not. Consider this contrasting pair to see the difference: I don’t know nothin’ about that. (reinforced n

Where is the error in the following line? He advised me to do as he said but I didn't pay any attention to his advice. I am confused what is the error here or even error been there or not? As far as my grammatical knowledge say that if there are two instances of the past then 'past perfect' will be used in first instance and simple past in 2nd.

What are the people who live in the same city are called? Any words for that? I want to use it in the following context: I and my ____ are happy.

Which of the following choices are correct? While I was reading a book last night, suddenly the electricity ______ . cut off cut out went off went out What are the differences between them, if any?

For example in the idioms "left and right" , "left, right and centre" , and in many contexts where both left and right are mentioned, it seems that the left usually comes before the right. Why is this so? I guess the begged, or zero-th, question: is there a preference when ordering left and right? Some people use "right and left" as well. I'm not sure how useful an Ngram search would be, due to both left and right having multiple meanings, e.g. "she turned to her right and left the house" or "he stood up, left and right then ...".

I read an article that used "thusly" and was wondering if there is any grammatical credence to it. The quote : The issue started when Sokolowski quickly ran out of storage capacity in his 32GB Surface after adding media files. After poking around, he realized that while the device has a 32GB drive, only 16GB of that capacity is available for users’ data. Thusly Microsoft is being sued for false advertisement, with the suit seeking class action status. Is thusly an outmoded form of thus, or does it have a different meaning altogether? Answer The Oxford English Dictionary records thusly as a colloquial form of thus , with an earliest citation of 1865. However, it is really quite unusual, and I wouldn’t recommend its use other than for some kind of special effect.

For example, when I tried to do my best at dancing, I "put my best foot forward". This is literally true because in dancing I put one foot in front of the other, but it's also figuratively true because I was sincerely giving it my best effort. Is there a word or a phrase that describes something that is both literally and figuratively true? Answer You can add "in both senses of the [word or phrase]." For instance, "I put my best foot forward" becomes either "In both senses of the phrase, I put my best foot forward" or "I put my best foot forward, in both senses of the phrase."

I am having some trouble understanding why relative adverbs function as adverbs in a relative clause. My family worships in a church, where my parents married. In the above example, I understand "where my parents married functions as an adjective clause, but cannot comprehend how where modifies the verb married.

I am trying to understand the rules for writing numbers in words under the UK rules (with "and"). I understand how to write small numbers (up to a few thousands), but I am not sure when to use "and" when the number is bigger. I tried Wikipedia, but the rules are not clear. Here are a few numbers I'm reasonably sure of: 102: one hundred and two 120: one hundred and twenty 1002: one thousand and two 1203: one thousand two hundred and three (though I'm not sure whether I should add a comma after "thousand" in this last one). Here are some bigger numbers. Is it okay to have multiple "and"s like this? Should some "and"s be commas instead, or just be omitted altogether? 102003: one hundred and two thousand and three 102304: one hundred and two thousand three hundred and four Here are some numbers bigger than one million (I use a space to separate digits for easier reading): 1 000 002: one million and two 1 000 020: one million and twe

I'm a moderator at another StackExchange site and a debate has come up about the usage of the trademarked name for which I site is about, i.e. WordPress . Note as a trademark it is spelled in CamelCase and thus we wanted our guidelines to be that you render it in CamelCase or we'll probably edit it so that it will be consistent (we don't expect that people will all notice this nor are we trying to get people to obey , we just want to let them know that we'd prefer they do it this way and if they don't we'll probably edit it for them as we are writing our answers.) Of course there is always at least one person who takes issue when a group tries to create order partly in this case because of a dust-up created by the founder of WordPress who recently added a function to WordPress to CamelCase the name in content on people's sites and has dismissed the outcry about it from a group of passionate people as not his concern. Ignoring whether he should or should not

For example, you're a fashion designer who wants to get the opinion of both a professional and someone who doesn't know much about fashion. What's a term for the latter person?

“between” vs “among” I learned that "between" refers to two objects or concepts and "among" refers to three or more. However, in situations when I am asking about distinctions, it seems correct to say, for example, "What is the difference between a horse, a zebra, and a mule?" as opposed to saying, "What is the difference among a horse, a zebra, and a mule?" What is the rule for questions like this about the "differences between" several things? Answer I was taught: Use between when you're talking about individual items -- even if there are more than two of them: "She was stuck between a Rock, a Hard Place, and a Hard Rock Cafe." Use among when you're talking about things that aren't distinct : "Dissension and dissatisfaction spread among the followers of Binky." Grammar Girl must have had the same teacher .

In my corner of the world, the two exressions given in the accepted answer to this question have become conflated. Now, to "have a bee up one's butt" is to have a sudden and obsessive need to do something one does not normally do. Example uses: Alice : So what made you want to plant a garden in your front yard? Bob : I don't know. I guess I just got a bee up my butt. Or Dave : Where has Eve been all week? Char : Ah, you know how it is. She and her husband got bees up their butts and flew off for a tropical vacation. While the "butt" variant is not blatantly obscene, it is perhaps not suitable for all social situations. I suppose the original version with "bonnet" is better, but seems a bit antiquated- when did you last see anyone wearing a bonnet? Is there an expression or idiom that would: Be acceptable in polite company Convey a similar whimsy Fit in with modern fashion and norms Answer If you want to convey a sense of a sudden desire to take d

These two-letter words ending in -o are pronounced with the vowel /oʊ/: bo, go ho, jo, lo, no, so , and yo whereas do and to are pronounced with the vowel /uː/. Is there an explanation for the discrepancy in pronunciation? Answer The question posed Why is “go” spelled with the same vowel as “do” and “to” since it is pronounced differently? makes an incorrect presupposition. That's the cause of the problem. Deny the presupposition and the problem goes away. That presupposition is that English spelling represents English pronunciation. This is False . The fact is that the spelling of modern English words does not give more than a vague guide to their pronunciation. Vowels, especially, are terribly inconsistent, because there are fourteen phonemic vowels in American English (see the list here -- there are even more in other dialects), all represented by only five vowel letters, in many traditional ways, all inconsistent. Each way was designed centuries ago by people who knew no

I am looking for idiomatic expressions that convey the value of persistence, such as a long, drawn-out battle where the victor is necessarily the person who simply outlasted the other. I know there is at least one good one, but I can't think of any. EDIT: Upon reading SethJeffrey's answer, I just realized I am actually looking for a maxim, not an idiom. I want something a little bit more substantial than an idiom. Here's an example I just made up: "It's not the obstacles on the roadway, it's the length of the track." This isn't very good...I'm looking for something like that, only a real maxim. Answer Rosalind Ferguson, The Facts on File Book of Proverbs (983) has several good suggestions along these lines: It's dogged as does it. Have at it, and have it. Slow but sure wins the race. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. [Ecclesiastes 9:11] Feather by feather the goose is plucked. Little strokes fell great oaks.

It's common in science to say something doubled (x2) or even quadrupled (x4) or quintupled (x5). However, higher orders of change are less frequently written in this form. The only exceptions are changes of 10x, 100x, 1000x , etc., which are often referred to as changes in " order(s) of magnitude ." This leads to my question: If I have a value that has octupled, is there another way to refer to this increase by avoiding usage of the uncommon word "octuple?" "Increased 8x ( or 8 times ) seems more like informal speech being placed into text, but perhaps I'm wrong about that. Does "increased by an order of eight" work? Or perhaps, it's more appropriate to say "increased by a factor of 8"?

Finding the precise history of the idiom, a piece of cake , is no picnic as I discovered. According to the websites: The idioms.com and Bloomsbury International (a British language school), its origins can be traced back to the late-nineteenth century US. It is believed that this phrase was invented in the 1870s during slavery in the southern states of America. As part of a dance or celebration organised by slave owners, black slaves would compete in ‘cake walks’ , performing a dance which imitated and subtely [sic] mocked the elaborate and ostentatious gestures of the white slave owners. The most elegant couple/team would be given a cake as an award. The “prize” for best dancing African American couple was a piece of cake , ergo... The piece of cake that was awarded as the prize to the best couple/team, came to be known among the blacks as something very easy to obtain. (A sort of underhand and hidden insult to unknowing white ruling class.) Now, I'm dubious whether slave owner