Blog

When you are looking at a task remaining, it seems right to me to say, "what needs to be done" in the simple present tense. I have seen some people write "what is needed to be done." While I don't know what is wrong in the second sentence, it doesn't seem alright. Can you tell me why is it wrong?

I’m looking for a generic word that means “debit or credit”. Say I have a transaction, and I don’t know whether it’s a debit on the account or a credit on the account, and I want to ask about it, is there a word I can use? For example, if I were asking whether a book were green or blue, I would ask, “What’s its color?” If I ask whether a transaction was a debit or a credit, can I fill in the blank, “What’s its _ ?” (Background: I’m looking to name a variable while programming, and the best I can come up with is type , which is not very descriptive). Answer I don't believe there's a single word that fits your request. In the ERP systems I've had access to, it's generally been referred to as Transaction Type (or Distribution Type , for AR and AP).

I know that diacritics are often retained in loanwords in formal writing (cf. naïveté ), but I haven't seen this done with direct adaptation of Latin words; i.e., per se . In Latin, per sē comes with a macron, indicating the longness of the vowel. This practice is uncommon (unused?) in English, but so are accents and diæresis marks, which are retained in the aforementioned naïveté . Is there any attested usage or relevant guideline regarding the adaptation of macrons from Latin? Answer In §11.94, Diacritics—specialized versus general contexts , the Chicago Manual of Style advises (emphasis mine): Nearly all systems of transliteration require diacritics—including macrons, underdots, and overdots, to name just a few. Except in linguistic studies or other highly specialized works, a system using as few diacritics as are needed to aid pronunciation is easier on readers, publisher, and author . ... For nonspecialized works, the transliterated forms without diacritics that are listed i

I've used "beknownst" and "unbeknownst" a couple times but I never really bothered to look it up until now. But it's not in most of the online dictionaries websites I frequent. I'm under the impression that this word is old school; if so, is it still appropriate to use? Or am I better off using some other word that means the same thing? Answer Technically there is no such word as 'beknownst' other than as a back-formation of 'unbeknownst' (unbeknown exists and in fact pre-dates unbeknownst. Beknown also exists). It is rather old-fashioned which is probably why some online dictionaries don't list it. They have essentially been superceded by 'known' and 'unknown', which have equivalent meanings. Nevertheless it is not uncommon to hear: Unbeknownst to me, my wife had already bought the same present. Or the like. It is perfectly appropriate to use.

For example, it's the first day at your new job and one of your colleagues is supposed to introduce you to the new working place. The person rants about everything in high speed without paying attention to whether or not you understand what he's saying.

If we're talking about 8 hundred (an exact number of hundreds) we use the singular for the ordinal. But what if we use an unspecified quantity such as "more". Or, I just said it: "number of hundreds". So I reckon it's "more hundreds", "more thousands". Is this correct? Exact context: If you have a larger budget, feel free to go for a few more hundreds of MHz more for your CPU. Answer We use the singular when the magnitude number is modified by few : We need a few hundred dollars. We need a few thousand widgets. If we keep the object, we would put more after the number: We need a few hundred more dollars. We need a few thousand more widgets. But if we drop the explicit object and go with the "few ... more" construction, the demarcation is not so clear, because the number becomes the object in the sentence: We need a few hundred more. We need a few thousand more. We need a few more hundred. We need a few more thousand. While it

Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. Is there a word which means to take pleasure in the misfortune of another when previously that misfortune was inflicted on you by that other person ? I won't describe here (in public) the particular circumstances in which I find myself looking for such a word, instead please enjoy this example from Three Men In A Boat . Rather an amusing thing happened while dressing that morning. I was very cold when I got back into the boat, and, in my hurry to get my shirt on, I accidentally jerked it into the water. It made me awfully wild, especially as George burst out laughing. I could not see anything to laugh at, and I told George so, and he only laughed the more. I never saw a man laugh so much. I quite lost my temper with him at last, and I pointed out to him what a drivelling maniac of an imbecile idiot he was; but he only roared the louder. And then, just as I was landing the shirt, I noticed that it was not my shirt at

What is the relationship between the words ductile and malleable ? They are definitely not antonyms, but can we call them synonyms? Answer Both words indicate an item can be shaped, as in metal or plastic, but you would not say a child's mind is ductile, because you don't hammer at a child's mind, or heat it to mold it into shape. Malleable is a more flexible word. Ductile has the property of physical shaping, while malleable has the property of formation. Malleable can include shaping by force, as in using a mallet. But malleable also could allow change through influence or subtle alteration as opposed to force: The child is malleable, so be careful what you teach him. Ductile allows only physical change of shape: I must heat the plastic to make it ductile. Ductile is also related to the word viscous or viscosity, because a solid that flows is ductile. Viscous lava can be shaped through physical means, but the more viscous it is, the less fluid the lava is, and the more

Consider these two sentences, one with a contraction, one without: I didn't check my voicemail. I did not check my voicemail. didn't is expanded to did not . Now consider: Why didn't you check your voicemail? If you want to write this without a contraction, you must write it as: Why did you not check your voicemail? The word you comes in between did and not when didn't is expanded. This: Why did not you check your voicemail? is probably not correct at all. I've never heard anyone speak like that, and never seen that written, even though didn't is expanded directly into did not . This came up during discussion the other day, and I was wondering if there was a term for this situation where a contraction cannot be expanded into what might seem the most obvious form. Answer Considering the following data I didn't check my voicemail = I did not check my voicemail. Didn't you check your voicemail? = Did you not check your voicemail? * Did not you c

For example: The unreliable employee often engaged in __ activities like smoke breaks, smalltalk with his fellows, and playing Solitaire during work hours. On Friday afternoons, the employees would often goof off and perform __ activities. Fred's mind often wandered while performing menial tasks and he thought about __ activities he would rather be doing. Best candidates so far: counter-productive/non-productive/unproductive unprofessional (?) Bonus : Come up with a word that eliminates the need for the word activity altogether: The project will not get finished any sooner if you keep wasting time on __ . Answer Use counter-productive with activity. It's professional and fits all of your examples. For a noun: Shenanigans. "We might go home early if there aren't any more shenanigans around the water cooler this afternoon. Shenanigans: high-spirited or mischievous activity —usually used in plural

Quite a few phrases in English are constructed like so: How [adjective] a [noun]...? This is the question form of the construction, which is often answered with the negative: Not that [adjective] a [noun]. or the positive: Quite [adjective] a [noun]. However, from time to time I'll hear the word 'of' inserted before the 'a', e.g.: Not that [adjective] of a [noun]. This usually sounds wrong to me, with the exception of the case where the adjective 'much' is used. So, this sounds fine to my ear: Not that much of a problem. whereas this doesn't: Not that loud of a noise. Why is it that 'much' should be used with 'of', and other adjectives not? Is it because 'much' is seen as measuring a quantity ( of something), whereas other adjectives that may be used in this construction are seen as measuring the quality of a whole thing? Answer What about "not that high (of) a fence"? "not that red (of) a heart" "not t

Is there a word for the opposite condition of hypochondriasis ? For example, someone who denies being sick when they clearly are? I would just say that they are "in denial". Is there any other adequate word? I thought about the obvious 'hyperchondria' but it doesn't seem to be used anywhere and doesn't look suitable as—from checking the origin of the word —just replacing 'hypo' by 'hyper' wouldn't fit well: 1555–65; < Late Latin < Greek, neuter plural of hypochóndrios pertaining to the upper abdomen (supposed seat of melancholy), equivalent to hypo- hypo- + chóndr ( os ) ensiform cartilage + -ios adj. suffix Answer I think egosyntonic comes reasonably close: Egosyntonic is a psychological term referring to behaviors, values, feelings that are in harmony with or acceptable to the needs and goals of the ego, or consistent with one's ideal self-image. Many personality disorders are considered to be egosyntonic and are, therefore,

Is it correct to use "Dear All" at the beginning of the e-mail, when you are writing to more than one person? It seems so informal to me. Is there any better way? Answer It depends on how formal or informal the tone of conversation is. First and foremost, consider who the audience is and what level of formality is appropriate to address them. There is no one blanket one-size-fits-all "best" way. If you address a group of colleagues in your own company, you may want to use "Hi all, ...". If you address the shareholders of your company, you may want to be more formal, e.g. "Dear Shareholder, ...". If etiquette is really important, you may want to invest in a mail merge to email, so you can address each person individually and avoid the mass email feel altogether. In internal company communications, I've seen the following variants in action: the IT Help Desk sends out an email to all employees to notify them about a system change. The distribu

Please log a CIP if ANY of the following is required to make the change: Please log a CIP if ANY of the following are required to make the change: I believe it should be are; but am I right?

I'd like a good word for "current item in a succession of items". Let's say I am looking ahead, towards my successor. Back behind me, I can also see my predecessor. What am I? I'd hate to use the overly-verbose "current object of focus among a succession of such objects", and yet "current" doesn't quite cut it either. "Currentssor"? The context is programming (coming up with descriptive variable names) but I'm really interested in what's true in general.

A simple Google seach will show that many people use “dwarven” as an adjective meaning “of or related to dwarves”. People can say things like “very dwarven”. But not many dictionaries list this adjective, and the ones I found that do don’t explain its etymology. Some people might think of “The Lord of the Rings” (published 1954) but LOTRproject indicates that dwarven actually does not appear in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings. [Edit: apparently, when I first wrote this question, I missed the fact that dwarven does occur in some of Tolkien's other writings that were published later on!] These works do contain elven, although as far as I can tell , Tolkien uses elven only in compound words, not as an adjective (so it might be more accurate for me to say it contains " elven- "). So my current theory is that Tolkien’s elven- was reinterpreted by later authors as an adjective, and then dwarven (adj) was formed by analogy with this. Could anyone

A colleague of mine corrected the following sentence in a text I had written: A handful of iterations was generally enough for convergence. According to her it should be: A handful of iterations were generally enough for convergence. I am, however, confident that my original usage was correct, but I am unsure how I should motivate this. EDIT: What made me think it was singular was not "a handful of". I thought it would be correct to say Five iterations is enough. because it is a statement about the number of iterations rather than the iterations themselves. When googling to find an answer I found a television series called Eight Is Enough . Is that correct because the noun is left out? Compare the sentences: Three friends are ideal. and Three friends is ideal. I would have thought that the first sentence means that there are three persons who are ideal friends, while the second sentence means that three is the ideal number of friends to have. But maybe my intuition is real

In the recently published ‘Oxford Modern English Grammar’, Bas Aarts classifies pronouns with nouns and not as a separate word class. In this, he follows the authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’. Is this now a widely accepted practice in pedagogic circles on both sides of the Atlantic?

I gave a quick answer to part of this question which had not been covered by previous answers, trying to clarify the reason you would say time of decoding but not decoding’s time . I said it was ’s usually indicates possession, but of course there were several counterexamples that would have occurred to me after a moment’s consideration, and these where helpfully supplied: Britain’s climate two days’ time a day’s work the sun’s rays I am still of a mind to say that possession of some sort is what allows the ’s . Even though the sun does not have title to its rays, they do belong to the sun. Now, at the risk of duplicating the original question and/or being pigheaded, I am curious as to why time of decoding but not decoding’s time is correct, if not for the reason I gave. Answer In The New Fowler's Modern English Usage , the late Burchfield offered a guide to the use of possessive s and of with inanimate nouns. It is the most comprehensive and well founded stylistic advice

I need to find a positive synonym for 'problem' or 'worst' for some copy I am writing. The context is that these are ratings for student performance in a tabular format (as in, "problem topics: lorem ipsum" or "worst topics: lorem ipsum"), and while I want to indicate that the topics I am describing need improvement, I don't want to sound overly negative. There is a good chance that the students have had exposure to basic economic theory, so I am considering "marginal" (especially since the topics being described are being prioritized to maximize the marginal benefit of studying). But this does not seem to be a standard usage. In fact, outside of economics, marginal seems to indicate the opposite of what I'm looking for. Any ideas? Answer You're looking for euphemisms . The business world is prepared to support you! :-) Traditional euphemisms for "problems" are "challenges" or "opportunities". Euph

I'm developing a social network which has a feature similar to twitter's follow/following setup. At the moment I have the following (hehe) terminology on the site: follower - someone who follows you followers - group of people who follow you I'm also using following at the moment to describe a group of people you are following. However, this also has the meaning of a group people who follow you. So what is the correct terminology for: a group of people you follow on social media? a person you follow? and how can you refer to the photos uploaded by the group of people you follow? The only thing I can find so far is 'who you follow' which is a bit wordy. Answer Followee A person who is being tracked on a social media website or application. (Oxford Dictionary) One who is followed (has his/her posts monitored by another user). (Wiktionary)

Wiktionary gives the meaning of " break bad " but does not mention about the origin: 1. (colloquial, of an event or of one's fortunes) To go wrong; to go downhill. 2. (colloquial, chiefly Southern US and Midwest US, of a person) To go bad; to turn toward immorality or crime. Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (by Jonathon Green) has the below definition that gives a hint about the origin: break bad v. 1 [1960s] (US Black) to become angry and aggressive 2 [1980s] (US campus) to perform well. [BREAK v. 2 (3) + SE bad ] break v. 2 (US) 3 [1930s] to conduct oneself. It looks like the origin is African American Vernacular English but how did this phrase emerge exactly? And how did it gain a new meaning (with almost opposite connotations) in campus slang? Answer I have heard of 'breaking bad' in the context of Southern slang but it has a surprising and older Wall Street reference: One of the earliest instances of the phrase appearing in the New York Times

I've been browsing through older lyrics of Judas Priest songs, namely Rocka Rolla , which has the following lines in a verse: Barroom fighter Ten pint a nighter Definite ninety-nine Diamond cluster Knuckle duster Feline on the borderline Context: the song is basically about a woman with "tough" image, i.e. frequently abusing alcohol and drugs, breaking the law, which probably would be a good pair for some kind of same thug-like "tough" guy. Timeline and origin: this song was written and published around 1974 in UK. I understand almost everything in this verse, except for "definite ninety-nine". I've done some homework, crawling around for the ideas, but being no native UK English speaker, I'm kind of at loss for what's the original meaning of this phrase. My guesses: "99" being "99 miles per hour", i.e. "going very fast" "99er" as in "a person who exhausted all of their 99 weeks of unemployment b

Creating a new word The rule of thumb used to be that when a word hit the Oxford Dictionary, it was considered to be an accepted word - this, however, seems to have transitioned into a lagging indicator in the last 5 years, primarily because so many new words are being created around the technological advances/services/products which seem to dominate our lives. When does a word 'officially' become a word - usage, social impact, cultural acceptance, mass media propagation?

I have seen several times on TV documentaries where the presenter is taken to something like a library archive, and shown a book which they proceed to read an excerpt from. On a couple of occasions the camera has shown the text they were reading and generally I have thought that I would struggle to read the words because of how the letters were formed (e.g. The thorn , or long S ). This got me to wondering about how pronunciation and sentence formation may have changed over time as well, and how far back in time could I travel and still be understood while speaking my "modern" English in England (while obviously not talking about modern concepts like mobile phones or space travel)? Answer It largely depends on your current dialect. Regions of the English-speaking world vary in pronunciation to the point where communication can be impossible. For example, my Canadian-influenced Upstate New York dialect often goes with a lot of blank expressions in West Virginia. Even in Bosto

“Good night” or “good evening”? I am in the process of creating a software application which displays a greeting to users based on the time of day. I have come to a blank on what to display to the user when it is late at night. 'Good night, [user's name]' just doesn't seem right. So, what is an appropriate greeting to use at night time?

I was looking for a term for someone who is addicted to a Q&A website but I came up with general terms like nethead , cybernaut , netizen , internet addict etc. You can think of adjectives like contributive , helpful or even devoted but they are also too general and they don't cover the "addiction" and "internet" part of the question. Although, I'm tempted to call this person fanatic : Anyway, I think there might be an online slang term for this specific type of person. For example, there is ask-and-run for someone who posts a question on a Q&A website and never checks back. (Related question: What do you call a Q&A user who posts a question but never checks back? ) It seems like it is a common phenomenon as there are a lot of Q&A websites nowadays: There are questions asked related to Stack Overflow addiction: Quora has a section for this phenomenon: http://www.quora.com/Quora-Addiction There are questions on Yahoo Answers about how to

Just as the title says — where, and how, did the phrase 'stone the crows' originate? Answer Etymonline offers no insight. The British National Corpus has three cites from 1989, 1991, and 1992. The Corpus of Historical American English has two cites, from 1981 and 1986. Wiktionary doesn't say anything about etymology, but marks the phrase as UK, Australian , and has a much older cite from Rose Of Spadgers by C. J. Dennis, 1924. The most extensive discussion I have found so far is over at The Phrase Finder : There have been a few attempts to explain the origin of this odd phrase. [...] The more prosaic suggestion — that it alludes to the practise of throwing stones at crows — is much more likely. I've found mid-20th century references from England that describe it as an Americanism and American newspaper articles that call it 'an old English phrase'. The dates of those are more or less right but not the locations — the phrase appears to have originated in Aus

There are at least a few terms used to describe specific speech impediments which are themselves difficult for a person with said speech impediment to say. For example: Li s p: Frequently conceived of as causing a person to pronounce the letter "s" as "th", although other forms of the condition exist. R hotacism: Inability to pronounce the letter "r". B laesitas: Softening hard consonants and hardening soft consonants; including the pronunciation of "b" as "v" or "p". Are there more examples like this? Was this a deliberate choice (presumably related to alliteration), or is it merely coincidental? I'm sure doctors wouldn't have chosen these words specifically because the affected people can't pronounce them, but is there an explanation of why these terms in particular were adopted?

'It may be wondered if the scope is too wide.' 'It may be wondered if the scope is not too wide.' Do these two sentences mean the same thing? Answer like FumbleFingers mentioned above, such pairs have the same meaning. In this case, they both mean that a knowledgable and impartial judge could easily think that the scope of Foo is too wide . It seems odd that two conditional sentences whose protases are opposites are actually equivalent. However, in these two sentences, you don't mean that We can wonder in the future about some other unknown thing if and only if we discover that the scope of Foo is too wide. What you actually mean is that It is already reasonable to wonder “Is the scope of Foo too wide?” The questions “Am I too late?” and “Am I not too late?” are effectively synonyms, because the real information that people want is the same in both cases : in both cases, the questioners want to know if they are still early enough to do something or if they missed

What is the difference between license and licence ? Are both variations accepted in US and UK? Answer In British English license is the verb and licence is the noun. American English uses license for both noun and verb.

I was wondering how linguists analyze sentences like "She hugged and kissed her mother" or "Will you have that with or without syrup?" or " Four and five are the square roots of sixteen and twenty-five , respectively"? My previous understanding was that all sentences can be analyzed as a tree , with each word being part of the "argument" of exactly one other word. So in the sentence "Will you have that with syrup", will have is the verb that the entire sentence hangs from, with you being the subject, that the object, and with syrup a prepositional phrase in which syrup depends on with . (Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.) But how would you ever draw a tree for "with or without syrup"? Specifically, whose child is syrup ? My first thought was that with or without forms a sort of super-preposition. But then what about "She rescued and provided shelter for the cat", in which the cat is simul

I was wondering if "way to do something" means it is right or wrong to do something? I thought it means it is right to do something until I read this: Just a few doors down, Lynette's sister shows up just in time to help her through her split with Tom. Unfortunately the once messy sibling shows up looking fabulous and on the arm of a sexy new boyfriend. Way to make Lynette feel good about herself!!! Don't you hate when that happens? When a friend or loved one shows up to try to help you through a troubling time and all they do is flaunt all of the fabulous things that are going on in their life.

I wanted to describe a helmet visor which can have separate settings, opaque and transparent. Thus I wrote the following sentence. She switched her visor to transparent. I thought it an ellipsis of a noun phrase: She switched her visor to the transparent mode. However after my spellcheck irritated me with being unhappy with my construction I started investigating. At the very least there are barely occurrences where the adjective after switched to is not followed by a noun it is modifying. The corpus search indicates that as well as the ngram . Although there are ngrams with switch to color , they are almost exclusively followed by a noun, the same applies to the clear hits, only that they include hits where 'clear' is a verb. Obviously I expected transparent and opaque to be dwarfed by the colors in the ngram, but there was not a single hit. Which is strange, since ngram does not care about the following words. This prompts my question is there some difference between the o

I'm from the United States and I have recently discovered that I don't pronounce the T as a soft D as other Americans do. Neither do most of the people in my area or my parents. I pronounce the word "butter" like someone from most areas of Britain would, I don't pronounce it like "budder." Other than the pronunciation of this consonant, my pronunciation aligns with the main American pronunciation. I was wondering if there is some kind explanation as to why the pronunciation of the t hasn't shifted to a D in my area? I live in the Southern New Hampshire by the way.

I really don't understand why others are using "forename" instead of "first name". Can someone explain the difference to me? Answer There is no generally understood difference in meaning between "forename" and "first name." They are different because "first name" is the most commonly used term, and "forename" is quite rare. In fact, I don't know if I've ever heard anybody use the term "forename," although it's easy enough to understand what is meant by it. The Google Ngram viewer indicates that "first name" has been much more common than "forename" as far back as it goes. Another synonym is " Christian name ," which in practice means exactly the same thing as "first name", although the terminology stems from the practice of "christening" or giving someone a name when they were baptized. However... If we really want to stretch to find a difference in

Because "aren't" translates to "are not" I pose the question, can you use both interchangeably (in the context of "aren't we all?")? "Are not" sounds very grammatically incorrect in this situation. Can you say "you need not go there" as opposed to "you needn't go there"? Basically, I thought you can say "you need not" instead of "you needn't" but that you can't say "are not" instead of "aren't" (in the context I've provided) because I've never heard the second. My friend believes that if you can use one example interchangeably, you can use the other as well. So, Can you use example '1' interchangeably? Can you use example '2' interchangeably? Answer No, you can't say "are not we all?" . It is ungrammatical, as you suggest. Yes, you can say either "you need not go there" or "you needn't go there" .

I do not understand how the phrase "apple of my eye" connotes affection. Where and how did this phrase originate and how can it refer to something dear? Answer You are right, it refers idiomatically to something that resembles an apple, that is the central part of an eye. According to the Word Detective : Before “apple of one’s eye” was used to mean “favorite,” it was used literally, as an anatomical term . The “apple of the eye” was the pupil, the aperture at the center of the human eye. At the time the phrase came into use, the pupil was erroneously thought to be a solid, round object, and it was called the “apple” because apples were the most commonly encountered spherical objects. As English idioms go, “apple of one’s eye” is about as old as they get. It first appeared in print in the writings of King Aelfred way back in the ninth century, and crops up, in the modern sense of “cherished favorite,” in both the King James Bible (numerous times) and Shakespeare’s “A Midsum

Consider the following use case: Please check the username and password are correct. Please check that the username and password are correct. In this case, I would say that that is required because it feels more natural to me and so the flow is better. However, is the lack of that wrong in this case? The question boils down to: when is that optional? See here . A quick summary: That is optional if the pronoun is the object. That is required if the pronoun is the subject. I think that we fall into the second case: that is required because the relative pronoun is the subject. But I'm not sure if I'm interpreting these rules correctly. Can someone please advise?

“The news is good.” Why? Does one ask "What are the news" or "What is the news"? Or are both correct in different situations? Answer It's very strange: every etymology I find for news shows it originating as a plural: from Middle English newes , plural of newe new ( adj ) on model of Old French noveles or Medieval Latin nova new things and yet it certainly isn't used as one now. You can't have a new ; the singular would be a news item , a piece of news , a story , a scoop ... You can refer to the new as an abstract, but that's a synonym for "that which is new": ...and this he apprehended would be particularly felt whenever the time arrived for exchanging the old for the new. The Parliamentary debates from the year 1803 to the present time, Volume 34 And of course you can begin anew , but that simply means "start again".

I see both "It's up to you" and "It's down to you" in conversations. So what's the difference? Answer I felt "It's up to you" means that you're the one responsible for the job, "It's down to you" means that nobody else is left who can do the job except you. ADDING ON: I realized from the comment that what I wanted to imply wasn't completely clear. As ngmiceli says, "down to you" suggests that there were others who could do the job, but for some reason, they are not available to do so (because they may be dead/busy/out to lunch), leaving only you.

What would one call the large horizontal structural fixture (on which the five faces are embedded)? The image is from the Chicago Civic Opera Building, built in 1928. This throne-shaped 49-story skyscraper is home to the internationally renowned Lyric Opera of Chicago. It features Art Deco and Art Nouveau styling and ornamentation, musical motifs and an impressive arcade that runs the length of the east facade Source: Open House Chicago Is there a precise, technical architectural term for such a substantial, protruding, horizontal structure below an external window? Note that I am not asking about the decorations on the structure, the faces, but the structure itself, which would presumably have the same name even if it were plain (if that's not the case, please do mention that in your answer).

There are four options: everybody, somebody, anybody and nobody. Which one should be used in X place ? Answer As FF has pointed out, only everybody and anybody are acceptable ( everyone and anyone also work). They work, and the others don't, for the same reasons: Too is a Negative -- too Adj to VP means ' so Adj that Not VP '; therefore NPIs like anyone work within its scope, and so anybody is used here, instead of somebody . That's also why nobody is ungrammatical here, because that would mean * The math problem is so difficult that nobody can't work it out. which is ungrammatical (that's what the "*" means). Everybody, somebody , and anybody are all Quantifiers -- logically , ∀ and ∃ . By DeMorgan's Laws , propositions with both a negative and a quantifier are ambiguous . Note the opposite orders of not (logically ¬ ), compared to some/any ( ∃ ) and every ( ∀ ) below. I.e, Everybody doesn't like it can mean either It

What's the best way to find the subject in a sentence? How do you define a subject? I am especially curious about such cases, in which the subject seems to be represented by more than one word: The majority of people didn't mind the new policy. A great number of students went on strike yesterday. Addition: and such cases where the passive voice is used: The man was bit by a dog. Children were frightened by the wolf. Also, please, consider such cases with ergative verbs: I broke my chair. The chair broke. The chair was broken by me. Answer Subjects are noun phrases, and usually have more than one word in them, but they can be just one word, if there are no modifiers. Subject is a grammatical concept restricted to languages with nominative-accusative systems, like most Indo-European languages. Languages like Basque, Georgian, Quiché, or Pitjantjatjara, which have absolutive-ergative systems, do not support a meaningful concept of Subject. Virtually all tensed English clauses (i

The Context Important rules of job interviews: A. Repeat to yourself: "It's not in the bag." B. To answer the question, "What would you do?" think of the correct answer to "What should I do?" and give that as your response. C. Laugh at their jokes, but don't offer your own. Answer It means that they should not be over-confident; the job isn't theirs yet. in the bag (informal) if something is in the bag, you are certain to get it or to achieve it Once we'd scored the third goal, the match was pretty much in the bag . Nobody knows who'll get the job, despite rumors that Keating has it in the bag . etymology : c. 16th. century, from the (bird hunting) 'game bag', meaning not only had the game been hit, but also found, retrieved and was now safely and irrevocably on its eventual way to the table.

According to Wiktionary, you can't use "a British " to refer to individual British people, though you can use it to refer to a race of people as a whole, but you can use "an Australian ", and this matches what I already suspect. I can't think of a good Google Ngram query to confirm this. Is this the case? And if so, why is there a difference? Answer Those of us who live in these offshore islands often have some difficulty in describing ourselves. We can say that we’re British (although some residents of Northern Ireland may have a problem with that), but there’s no ready equivalent of the sentence She’s an Australian . She’s a Briton is just about possible, but sounds contrived. Britisher might also be found, particularly in films about WWII, but it’s not current. The difficulty arises because British is an adjective, and only an adjective. Like certain other adjectives it can be used as the head of a noun phrase in some contexts. ‘The adjective-headed n

(a) When one reads the Hindi literature of the twentieth century, he finds a striking contrast between the writings of Munshi Premchand and later day writers of popular Hindi fiction. (b) When one reads the Hindi literature of the twentieth century, one finds a striking contrast between the writings of Munshi Premchand and later day writers of popular Hindi fiction. According to me, (b) should be the correct one as "one" cannot be used interchangeably with other pronouns when referring to the same thing. But the correct answer is (a). Can someone explain? Answer There is not really a “correct” answer. There is no central authority in the English language that decides on the correctness of words or word usage. English is broadly spoken and adapted worldwide and has taken many words from other languages and from slang. The only rule in English is to try and write so that your readers will understand you. You say that (a) is correct, but it is quite likely that somebody on