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I once posted an article on the web in which I referred collectively to people from China, Japan, and the Koreas as "Oriental". I got an email from someone who informed me that this is an offensive term and that I should call such people by the specific country of origin -- "Chinese" or whatever -- or collectively as "Asians". She claimed that "Oriental" refers to an object, like "an Oriental vase", and is insulting when applied to a person. I consider "Asian" inappropriate as it would include Siberians, Afghans, Pakistanis, etc. And of course "Chinese" is unacceptable if you want to include Japanese, Koreans, and related cultures. So my question is: Do people from this part of the world really find the word "Oriental" offensive? If so, what term do they prefer for themselves? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from someone who actually is of Japanese, Chinese, etc., background, rather than an Am...

What is the origin of the expression bug when used to refer to software? Wikipedia says it's from 1843 in Ada Byron's notes on the analytical engine . Another source I found was on dictionary.com: The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which " bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted memory of a joke first current among telegraph operators more than a century ago! It seems to me that nobody really knows and that it's just a reference that came into being maybe through another domain than software and eventually creeped into it when computers and software were born. I've always thought that it might have been because an actual bug (insect) went into a mechanical calculator and got jammed somewhere which messed the process. Answer The story I've always heard was that Adm. Grace Hopper coined...

The blog post here uses the title “Isn’t this just the cutest thing you ever did see ?” I am sure this is correct, but my question is, but what difference it would have made had he used the following version instead: “Isn’t this just the cutest thing you ever saw ?” Answer There is a formulaic expression in English, going back quite a while, that goes "the xxxxxest xxxx you ever did see. From Google books: 1666: the finest pile I ever did see — from Samuel Pepys' diary 1792: strangest reason perhaps you ever did or will hear 1799: the ugliest old creature I ever did see 1832: the highest tree prehaps you ever did see 1832: the drollest varmint perhaps you ever did see 1835: the primest piece you ever did see 1836: the most knowing-looking little bit of a horse you ever did see 1836: most genial islands you ever did see 1851: the greatest muss you ever did see 1866: we have got one of the gratis olde raskells for a Captain you ever did see 1884: the sickest little shaver you ...

Are both try to save the file and try saving the file grammatically correct? If so, is there any difference in meaning? Answer They're of course both grammatical, but there is a conventional meaning difference that may not be obvious, as there often is with a verb like try that takes both Equi infinitive and Equi gerund complements. Such available syntactic bandwidth is likely to get used for pragmatic purposes. In this case, the gerund is the one without any special entailments — i.e, saying 1. He tried opening the door. requires no special assumption by a listener — or at least is intended to sound that way — while in 2. He tried to open the door. the infinitive complement (but not the gerund) is subject to the Gricean interpretation (i.e, an interpretation, predictable from Grice's Maxims ), that, if one can only say truthfully "He tried to open it" instead of just "He opened it" , then one conversationally implicates his failure in opening it. ...

What is the correct relative pronoun for "government"? Which of the following phrases is correct? I am writing for an American [English] audience. The Queensland Government, who licenses several casinos, ... or The Queensland Government, which licenses several casinos, ...

In my report a need to write a list of example questions that someone might ask, but I would like to do it in a sentence rather than a separate list. Here is an example: This poses questions such as "How should I punctuate it?", "Are the quotes necessary?", "Are the commas in the correct place?", and "Should I have used a colon, or a semi-colon?" Answer I'd use a bulleted list and drop the quotation marks, like so: This poses questions such as: How should I punctuate it? Are the quotes necessary? Are the commas in the correct place? Should I have used a colon, or a semi-colon? Such formatting would look out of place in a novel or other prose, but would look very natural online or in some technical document. While I may be a product of my time, I think bulleted lists are an excellent way to break up a list of items and does so without a bunch of cluttering punctuation. In cases where a bulleted list would be out of place, I'd suggest usin...

Which of the 2 sentences is correct? Sam is looking forward to see the Rocky mountains. Sam is looking forward to seeing the Rocky mountains.

I've heard this word used before but I can't remember it! I've heard it used to describe wars like Iraq and Vietnam. Something you can't escape easily and is causing large problems, like a pit? Here is an example: The American government has decided to pour extra money into the war in Iraq, unable to escape the ______ it has entered. Answer "Quagmire" is certainly a fitting word for your example: "The American government has decided to pour extra money into the war in Iraq, unable to escape the quagmire it has entered." Definition from M-WO : 2: a situation that is hard to deal with or get out of : a situation that is full of problems The first definition (also from M-WO) is helpful in understanding how "quagmire" came to be used for other tricky, dangerous situations: 1: soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot EDIT: "Quagmire" was apparently quite commonly used to describe the US' involvement in the Vietnam War...

I felt a little bit strange when I heard poignant pronounced as /ˈpɔɪɲənt/ . It is also pronounced as /ˈpɔɪgnənt/ , but the former seems to be more popular. A word stagnant has similar spelling, but it is pronounced as /ˈstægnənt/ . Why is poignant pronounced like that? I guess that the /ɲə/ sound is not so popular in English pronunciation. Are there any other words which are pronounced like /ɲə/ ? Answer As you’ve discovered, poignant and its derived forms poignance and poignancy are pronounced with a different sound than occurs in words with similar endings like benignant, indignant, malignant, oppugnant, pregnant, regnant, repugnant, resignant, and stagnant . Those others all have /gn/ , but poignant alone does not: it has /ɲ/ for same spelling. For the word poignant , the OED2 gives two phonemic forms: /ˈpɔɪnənt/ and /ˈpɔɪɲənt/ It is the second of those that has drawn your attention. I have not heard the first of those myself. Note that Oxford Dictionaries Online now g...

Somewhere in the craggy quagmire of my memory, I seem to recall that the nuns of my grade school days taught me that a P.S. (post script) is followed by a colon, i.e. P.S.: Alas, the periods after the "p" and "s" have all but disappeared in our Tweet-crazed culture but I persist in using them, not wanting to call down upon me the wrath of my former and now surely dearly departed nuns. But what of the colon? Is this a non-memory of my angst-ridden Catholic education? It seems wrong to follow a period (a full stop, after all, that signals a new thought) with the contents of a post script without some intervening mark. However, I do admit that on paper it does look, well, clunky. And try as I might, I cannot find the usage anywhere (I may eschew Twitter but I do Google (the content provider having given birth to a verb). Doth the lady punctuate too much?

In my opinion, "Think badly of someone" is right. But when I was watching a Vietnamese film with English subtitles "Think bad of me". Apologize for my bad English.

We say that could is sometimes the past of can. If that's true then why can't we use it in the following context. They didn't let us. We could walk. Instead we say: They didn't let us. We could have walked. But we can say: Listen! I can hear something. I listened and I could hear something. Why not "I listened and I could have heard something" Answer Per the top answer to this question , there's a tendency in many languages for words to shift in meaning between probability and desirability , where probability covers what englishclub.com define as zero/first/second/third conditional modes (certain/probable/possible/impossible) . The "core" sense of can/could involves capability , which is part of the probability/desirability issue, so along with other modal verbs it has many inconsistencies and idiomatic meanings. Turning to OP's specific examples... "They didn't let us. We could walk." is perfectly valid, given an approp...

I believe that "assume", "presume", "suppose" are similar in meaning of to take some facts as a truth without proof . But it seems to me that "presume" is more formal, "assume" is less formal and "suppose" is the most general word for this meaning. Am I right? Maybe there are other differences in meaning and usage of these words? Answer An assumption is technically something that must be taken for granted in order for an argument to go through. Some assumptions cannot, in principle, be proven. For instance, there is probably no way to prove that anything exists outside of my own mind, but I assume this because otherwise I would quickly die as a result of walking front of a non-existent car. Less fancifully, if I thought that physics was a good and useful thing, then no matter how much I might doubt it, I would be forced to assume that the physical world exists if I wanted to be a physicist. "Presume" has about the s...

I'm wondering if native speakers understand all the words in songs. For me it is very very difficult, as I can usually understand only 30% of words and phrases in songs. While listening to people's conversations (e.g. podcasts) I understand much more, perhaps about 80%. This was the first part of the question. The second part involves an example. Listen to this great song from Nick Cave . Do native speakers really understand all the words in this song? I mean without looking at the lyrics. Is it possible? He sings very fast and there are no spaces or pauses between the words, so I mostly "hear" isolated words, and the rest of the song is just some kind of gobbledegook. Update Let me explain why this question is not off-topic. It's closely related to English because in my native language (which is Russian) we always understand all the words in songs, I mean we understand more than 99% of words all the time. And I was wondering who's to blame. Is my English so p...

For example, we have - car /kɑː(r)/ - or /ɔː(r)/ I thought the brackets means you delete it - i.e. non rhotic - but now I see the phonetic spelling of words like "hard" which don't include the r at all /ˈhɑːd/

I was taught that ever should be used in questions ( Have you ever...? ) and never should be used in negations ( I have never... ). But reading " A wizard of Earthsea " by Ursula K. Le Guin I spotted such a sentence: " Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? " Is that grammatically correct? What does the author want to say by this? Answer Consider the slight difference between the two following sentences: Do you love her? Don't you love her? The first is a mere question that requires an answer — yes or no. The second implies surprise. The asker would assume that he does love her, but has some (indirect) evidence for the contrary and is expressing his surprise with a negative interrogative question. Now, the same difference is between: Have you ever thought...? which is just a question with no special implication of surprise, and Have you never thought...? which implies that the person who's asking expects one to have t...

Could someone please explain to me which of these sentences is correct and why? Only one out of three respondents (29%) thinks otherwise. Only one out of three respondents (29%) think otherwise. I understand that the subject of this sentence is singular, and therefore, theoretically, the verb should be singular, but this just doesn’t sound right. Could someone please help?

I understand that "red herring" means something like a clue or indicator that is misleading. But where does this come from? What does a misleading clue have to do with smoked fish? Answer There is a nice explanation on ask.yahoo . British fugitives in the 1800s would rub a herring across their trail, thereby diverting the bloodhounds that were hot in pursuit. In the 1920s, American investment bankers started calling preliminary prospectuses "red herrings" as a warning to investors that the documents were not complete or final and could be misleading. Edit: Also there's this wiktionary entry It originated from a news story by English journalist William Cobbett, c. 1805, in which he claimed that as a boy he used a red herring (a cured and salted herring) to mislead hounds following a trail; the story served as an extended metaphor for the London press, which had earned Cobbett's ire by publishing false news accounts regarding Napoleon.

Is placing a pronoun immediately after its antecedent in a sentence valid grammar? Is there a term for this construction? Some examples are: President Obama, he gave a speech last night. The speech, it was about the financial system. I hear this on the Planet Money podcast at least once per episode. Answer Huddleston and Pullum (authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’) call it ‘dislocation’, of which they distinguish two types, ‘left dislocation’, where the Noun Phrase is postioned to the left of the clause nucleus, and ‘right dislocation’, which describes the opposite. As an example of left dislocation, they give ‘One of my cousins, she has triplets.’ This construction seems to match exactly the OP’s examples. Huddleston and Pullum further comment, ‘Dislocated constructions can be easier to understand than their basic counterpart.’

How should I punctuate around quotes? I'm having a devil of a time trying to determine how to punctuate an embedded quoted question within a declarative sentence. A comma is used to introduce the quote, but things get hairy at the end of the quote. When Ms. Peremptory asked, "Are you ever going to be ready?" I was unable to respond. Is this situation best handled with no closing comma? Placement in any of the possible spaces between the closing "y" in "ready" and the subject of the sentence produces visually confounding -- though possibly grammatically correct -- results.

Which one is the correct one? A total of 10 babies is sleeping. (A) A total of 10 babies are sleeping. (B) Ten babies in total are sleeping. (C) For me, both (A) and (C) are correct. But (B) is also used in speech. Answer (B) is perfectly correct in either American or British English. Take a look at this example from the Cambridge Dictionaries Online : A total of 21 horses were entered for the race. (C) is also correct, as ten babies is explicitly plural, and should thus take the plural are . (A) is not correct because the collective noun total should always be treated in the plural sense when it is explicitly used with the word, number , or the word, number , is implied (in a strict sense*), the items being counted are identified/clarified/specified, AND the size of the number is given. In the following examples, all conditions are satisfied: A total of number of 3500 students were at the seminar. [Plural] A total [number] of 11 shells are in my possession. [Plural] In this examp...

I have been wondering about the rising pitch used in almost every sentence, by especially young Americans. What is the purpose/intention of rising pitch except in questions? Is it friendly and polite, or condescending? Is it proper to be used in presentation and teaching and other professional occasions? For example: In this video , starting around 0:40, when Amy Chua introduced herself. Answer What you're talking about is known to linguists as the High rising terminal (HRT), and referred to informally as uptalk . This is a relatively recent phenomenon in spoken American English, and its origins are unclear. What is clear is that it doesn't signal a question, and is perceived by many people to be sub-standard and irritating. For that reason you should avoid it if possible in formal settings. For more information, here is a very long and informative Language Log post about HRT, including a variety of links to other sources. I quote a few paragraphs from near the end which ...

I'm not a native English speaker and here in Brazil we have the word "expectativa" as a noun. The expectative in English is defined as an adjective: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/expectative But I haven't see yet the usage in this form, rather we see "expectation", which act as the Portuguese "expectativa" (expectation). We do have this word as adjective "expectante" as is the "expectant" in English, but not the "expectative" form. So, in which case we use "expectative"? EDITED: I've googled and found this one: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05712b.htm An expectative, or an expectative grace, is the anticipatory grant of an ecclesiastical benefice, not vacant at the moment but which will become so, regularly, on the death of its present incumbent. And this one: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X96000770 Expectative land rights, house consolidation and cemetery squatting:...

I heard this sentence in an American film a while ago as I was watching it on DVD (the part after but is verbatim): "I'm doing my best but I mustn't be doing it right ." This is something I occasionally hear in American films: phrases like "he mustn't have done it" or "she mustn't be studying now" , where a logical conclusion is expressed. So far I've thought that the normal thing to say is "he can't have done it" or "she can't be studying now" . My question is: Can mustn't be used to express a logical conclusion when the speaker is certain that something didn't happen or isn't happening, at least in informal speech? Is this an American usage? (I've never heard this usage in British English, but this doesn't mean it doesn't exist.) Is there a change going on in the usage of the particular modal verb? Note: All the references I've checked don't even mention this use of mustn...

It is rather rare to hear a speaker pronounce vowels like this, so I would like to know where it comes from. I live in North America, so my only experience is with American English. Most notably, I have heard /ɑ/ in "got" pronounced as /æ/. As well, "no" as "nɛ". And come to think of it, "actually" which should use /æ/ is being pronounced as /ɛ/. A more common occurrence may be the /e/ in "okay" substituted for /ə/, /ɪ/, or /i/. I have found a couple of examples from this video , such as "end" as [ɪ]nd. It's not necessary to watch but may help. It's not the prominent accent that I've heard, as in the first example. But my question is where did this begin, and where in the US does it occur most? Answer /a/ ⟹ /æ/ is part of the ongoing sound change now occurring in northern urban speech groups in American English called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift . This is a big change in English vowels, as complex and thorough...

I often encounter people saying "you right" instead of "you are right". Is it correct? UPDATE. I meant I often encounter things like "yes, you right" in written form. Answer The written phenomenon, of 'you right' used to mean the statement 'you are right', is well documented. (many examples at google books . Most of the examples seem to be AAVE which very characteristically drops the 'to be'. In addition to the possibility that some instances may be EFL speakers who natively speak a language that drops the copula, there is a trend in texting/twitter to telegraphic language, where some things are dropped.

I would like to place a statistics in front of the sentence, followed by the agency that has reported it. The findings and reports were done many years ago. Which of the two is correct and why? Nearly 10 million Americans accept..., the U. S. Office of Public Affairs reports. Nearly 10 million Americans accept..., the U. S. Office of Public Affairs reported. Likewise, should it be "Americans accept" or "Americans accepted"?

I commented against an earlier question “No A or B” vs. “Neither A nor B” that in contexts such as The system has had no error since 2013 native speakers would invariably use the plural errors . As I see it, the two extremes for singular/plural usage here can be typified by, for example,... 1a: I've had no food since Monday. 1b: I've had no friends since leaving school. ...where my first thought was we use singular food because it's a mass noun . I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that's what underpins my increasing aversion to the singular noun forms in... 2a: I've had no trouble since switching to Linux (at this end of the list, plural seems unlikely to me) 2b: I've had no difficulty since switching 2c: I've had no problem since switching 2d: I've had no error since switching (at this end, only plural works for error, setback, issue, etc.) (The example is totally made up - I'm actually having all sorts of problems with Ubuntu Linux! ...

I've read this and this . I know that the underlying question has been answered, my problem is of a different nature: I'm currently writing my master's thesis in CS and my professor thinks that the apostrophe possessive is only applicable to people. He claims to have spoken to a linguist from Cambridge who confirmed his opinion. Neither my professor nor I am a native speaker and the thesis is being written in Germany. Now, I know that he won't care if I just send him a couple of links to the answers here. So my question is: How do I convince my professor? Are there any "more scientific™" sources that I can point to? Examples of phrases: If each plant's humidity is displayed publicly [...] [...] shows an overview of the node's structure. Due to an issue in the network stack's IPv6 subsystem [...] Answer As few people are addressing the '"more scientific™" sources' bit of the question, it should be pointed out that there are a num...

I remember that there was a word that meant being knowledgeable about many words, but I've forgotten what the word was.

I've recently made a couple of trips to the London area, and I've had a terrible time trying to convince the hotel breakfast cooks that I want my eggs fried "over hard", meaning that both the white and the yolk are cooked until solid. It may just be that the cooks were not native English speakers, but I'm wondering whether this is a term used in American English but not in British English. Is there a good way to express this in the UK?

I came across a phrase, senators who become a scarlet letter , in an article of today’s Washington Post (Jan.29) titled "Tea Party Caucus holds first meeting without some who had embraced banner." The sentence in question reads as follows: The Republican senators who rode the tea party wave to victory in the fall are now weighing whether that label will help them on Capitol Hill or become a scarlet letter. I understand scarlet letter means the letter of A in red signifying adulterer, and it was used as figurative expression by all means. However in this case, I'm puzzled with whom (i.e. political group, faction, clique) do the Senators in question commit adultery, and who is their due (should-be) partner (husband or wife, i.e electral franchise or belonging clique)? Why can they be dabbed a scarlet letter ? I read the whole article, but I couldn't figure its meaning out to the end. Can anybody explain? Answer As you stated, the "scarlet letter" was the let...

Can we say "Did you fix me that account?" Or should it be "Did you fix that account for me?" assuming something is wrong with the account. Account represents a computer based system user id.

Is it correct to say that, nowadays, English has the dative case, or was it only present in Old English? Answer It actually depends on what kind of theoretical framework you are operating under. If your question is whether English has some sort of overt affix that attaches to words that marks dative case unambiguously, then the answer is no. (If ambiguity between accusative and dative case is fine, then many of the pronouns, as well as whom , could be considered to be marking dative). However, case marking does not have to necessarily be done with an affix, it can be done with a preposition. In English, the preposition to is used to mark dative case . For example: To me , this is an easy problem. I gave ten dollars to them . She's like a sister to him . You could say that this "replaced" case marking, but, in fact, this is case marking! The word to has essentially no meaning except to mark the specific function in the sentence of the noun it modifies. To compare, in ...

Observed some words get pronounced with a /sh/ rather than /s/ in certain situations. Stripes as "Shtripes" (from some "The Wire" episode) Screw it as "shcrew it" (from a rap song) In both situations, it seems to be a matter of emphasis, but is there some generic etymological root to this, e.g. a yiddish language background? Answer I do this. It is called palatalization and is caused by the "tr" combo more than anything. The same process also occurs without "s", and with "dr". I often say, for example, "tree" as [tʃri] ("chree") and "drier" as [dʒrajɚ] ("jrier"). These variants don't come from Yiddish, German, or any other language. It is simply a natural phonological process that occurs in many languages, often due to co-articulatory factors. So, in this particular case, it is caused because our English "r" sound ([ɹ] to be precise, but for simplicity I'll just use t...

I would like to know how a transliteration of a foreign name becomes "the accepted version", and why the accepted version is sometimes replaced. I would also like to know why some transliterations into English make absolutely no sense to English readers: i.e. what is the main purpose of transliteration into English? It cannot be to help English speakers give an approximate pronunciation, because sometimes the transliterated form uses letter combinations not found in English, that make no "sense" in English orthography.

In the Longman Dictionary of Common Errors you read "When you ask for or give a description of someone or something, use what ... like (NOT how ): 'What's your new teacher like?' But I sometimes hear people say things like " How is your new teacher?" as a way of asking someone to describe someone or something. To me, the response to that question could be "She's fine", not a description of the teacher's appearance or behavior, since I think of it as a question about someone's health or life condition, e.g. if they are well or happy. What about " How 's the weather?" and " What 's the weather like ?" ? Do you see any difference? Is it that the former is used to ask a question about if the whether is good or bad in a specific situation, and the latter to ask about the general weather conditions in a place? So one can say " What 's the weather usually like in Toronto?" and the answer would be ...

I have a question to ask regarding this quote. In the formation of a marketing strategy, it is imperative that one consider s the marketing mix, also known as the 4Ps – product, price, place, and promotion. Should there be an 's' after consider? Am I correct in saying that in a sentence like the one below, an 's' should follow the word consider? It is imperative that the girl considers the marketing mix. I seem to have seen similar sentences constructed both with and without the 's' after the verb before, e.g. It is imperative that the girl go to school. It is imperative that the girl goes to school. Does this have anything to do with plurals and singulars, or with tenses? Wow, this seems to be an awfully basic question but for some reason I just don't quite remember what should be done here. (NOTE: The OP's question involves the mandative construction, one which might involve a subordinate subjunctive clause. -- F.E.)

How to fix my computer? How to save money? Are these grammatically correct questions? Answer They are grammatical, but they should be used with care, because they are subordinate clauses, rather than complete sentences. They might occur as headings, or at the start of a paragraph that goes on to answer the question. Even then, they are generally confined to informal writing. You wouldn’t expect to find them in academic prose, for example.

Is there a rule beyond the common "no the with proper nouns and names" for the following problem? I saw the Empire State Building. We went to the White House. We saw the Golden Gate Bridge. but I went to Death Valley National Park. I crossed Brooklyn Bridge.

I often get confused how to use in , on , at , from and for . Examples: I have a phone in/on/at my bag. Meet me at/in/on this hotel. They sound kind of right but I'm not sure which is correct. Is there a simple way to remember how to use those? Answer to and for are usually used for an indirect object, such as: I gave a book to Tom for his birthday . in is short for inside , denoting a location in the interior of something; for example: I have a phone in my bag . on is a location resting on top of, or above, something else: The lamp was on the table . at describes being in proximity to, or coincident with, a geographic location: Oh no! I left the tickets for the play at the hotel, in the envelope, on the dresser . Another usage of to is the one opposite in meaning to from . In this case motion between two locations (or times) is inferred, with the source being referenced by from and the destination by to : I moved the car from the garage to the street so we could finall...

Normally, whenever I've heard the word "pew" (or its Bugs Bunny-esque cousin P.U.), it's applied to a bad smell of some kind. I just started learning an old folk song from the Appalachians called "Mountain Dew" in which there's a stanza: Well, my old aunt June bought some brand new perfume It had such a sweet smelling pew But to her surprise when she had it analyzed It was nothing but good old mountain dew These words are pretty old, back to the 30s. My question is, has "pew" ever had a connotation anything other than the current (bad)? Or did they just juxtapose "sweet smelling" with "pew" for comic (as well as rhyming) effect? Answer The Wikipedia entry for " Good Old Mountain Dew " indicates that the song's lyrics appear in two American versions—a ballad-like song from 1928 by Bascom Lamar Lunsford , and a less story-like narrative from 1935—with a possible further connection to an Irish song called " ...

To understand something means to be aquainted with it, to know it very well, know how it "ticks". This is one of the basic words that has a direct "meaning" in mind. However, if we "dissect" it, is seems like it means to stand under something. Isn't knowing something would logically be called abovestand and not understand , since when you are under something, you are less informed about it then when you are above it. This may seem senseless to you, but I am sure a native English speaker will get the idea of what I am trying to say. Why under , not above ? Answer It's not "logical" . It's metaphorical . Here's the etymology from the OED: [OE. understondan, -standan (under-1 8 a), = OFris. understonda , MDa. understande , MSw. undi(r)standa , OIcel. (as a foreign word) undirstanda . Cf. MLG. understân to understand, to step under, MDutch onderstaen (Dutch - staan ), MHG. understân , - stên (G. unterstehen ), to take upon ones...

Please consider the following sentence. I summarize these topics in the conclusions, with hopes that others will research them further. Does “them” refer to the “topics,” or does it refer to the “conclusions”? It is supposed to refer to the former. Am I forced to write it more verbosely, as follows? I summarize these topics in the conclusions, with hopes that others will research the topics further. Answer I think there are three ways to analyze this, two of which have been suggested. The first is with a naive application of the rule of the nearest antecedent. "Conclusions" is separated from "them" by fewer words than "topics," so "conclusions" must be the antecedent. The second is with a highbrow application of the rule of the nearest antecedent. (I am applying a theory here that I was exposed to only in passing a long time ago, so forgive any injustice I might do to it and my lack of attribution.) Consider this pseudo-diagram of your sentence:...

What is the word that means “that which can be fixed up at home”? For example, I buy parts from a store, bring the parts home, and then can construct the thing out of those parts by myself. What is the word that means such an object, one that can be made at home in a do-it-yourself style? Answer I don't think there is a single word, hence the popularity of the acronym DIY. The closest term I can think of is self-assembly .

This song by The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". As a non-native speaker, I always wondered what's the exact meaning of this phrase? Is it "I'm not getting any satisfaction" (this seems to be the most widely met translation; double negation used where single negation should have been used). Or is it "I want my satisfaction, I cannot leave without getting some" (makes much more sense to me). Or is it something else? I've always had troubles understanding double negation as applied to English. First I was taught it's a mistake to use double negation at all, and then I see it everywhere. Answer The reason you were told it’s a mistake is because it is a usage found in dispreferred dialects. Similar to use of ain’t , double negation—also known as negative concord—is quite common in many dialects of English, but it is not part of any formal register of English—that is to say, it is not a feature of the standard English tau...

What is the correct way to convert "used to do" into a question? Since I want to emphasize that the action is not on-going any more, so simple past tense is not a good idea here. Could I say "do xxx use to do" or "did xxx use to do"? Both sound weird to me. If there is no way to do it. Do you suggest any other alternatives? Answer Well, most of your doubts would be retracted after reading up http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verbs-m_used-to-do.htm I would like to summarize the main points from the webpage. 1) We use the used to do expression to talk about: - an activity that we did regularly in the past (like a habit) - a situation that was true in the past For example, He used to watch a lot of TV. They used to be married. 2) Used or use? - when there is did in the sentence, we say use to (without d) - when there is no did in the sentence, we say used to (with d) For example, Did you use to smoke? I didn't use to go swimming.