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Are there rules of usage when using the ampersand "&" instead of "and"? Are they completely interchangeable? The ampersand seems more casual, but I'm not sure. Answer There are very, very few acceptable uses of & in proper written English. Here are some of them: & is especially common when joining names to indicate a firm or a partnership, for example, a law firm: Baker & McKenzie Abercrombie & Fitch Crosby Stills Nash & Young In abbreviations, when abbreviating "and", & is often used: AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) P&L (profit and loss) R&D (research and development) One rare usage is on envelopes addressed to a couple: Mr. & Mrs. Jackson &c. is a rare and somewhat archaic looking abbreviation for etc. Other than that it is vanishingly rare to see & in formal written English, although of course in informal email, text messages, notes, and handwriting, anything goes.

My partner Kate asked me a question today that I could guess about, but not answer. It's a Phrase Origin search, which I'm pretty bad at (because I don't really care when a phrase originated; I'm much more interested in the metaphors it's involved with). So I decided to post it here for her. She frequently encounters the phrase money quote on her favorite blog , and was unfamiliar with it. She'd like to know where and when it came from, and I'd be interested in any origin stories. I am familiar with it, as it happens, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it for years if not decades, but it's probably been on the usage upswing for a while because of the penchant for labelling money quotes as such in blogs. So, does anybody know? Answer William Safire New York Times, "On Language", March 13, 2005 traces first usage to a 1984 Biography of Barbara Hutton (evidently Poor little rich girl: the life and legend of Barbara Hutton by Heymann): ...

The plural form of leaf is leaves , although according to Merriam-Webster leafs is also correct. Dwarf can be pluralized as either dwarfs or dwarves . Conversely, the words roof and safe are pluralized as roofs and safes . Is there any logic underpinning these variations? Is there a historical trend where words that were previously pluralized as -ves are now being increasingly pluralized as -fs ? Answer So, the f -> v shift can be traced back to Old English, where v wasn't its own letter, but merely an allophone of f . The /v/ pronunciation was used when it was placed between vowels or voiced consonants, and the /f/ pronunciation was used otherwise. So the declination from wīf to wīfes meant that the actual pronunciation of the f went from /f/ to /v/ (much like today today), because it became positioned between two voiced vowels (I should point out, in OE wīfes was a two-syllable word [wiːvɛs]). Now, over time, a few things happened: V became its own phoneme...

“This book will change your wife.” The cliché is “This book will change your life”. By changing one word, the cliché is transformed into a more interesting sentence: in this case about a novel, 50 Shades of Grey . Is the word wife in this context a trope? trope (trp) n. A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor. A word or phrase interpolated as an embellishment in the sung parts of certain medieval liturgies. "This book will change your wife" was one of the comments in a television program on Channel 4. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/sex-story-fifty-shades-of-grey The programme examines the sociological and cultural effects the book is having in the UK, as sales of obscure classical music and bondage gear increase. TV REVIEW: Sex Story - 50 Shades Of Grey - The Study Of A Phenomenon Of BDSM, Or 'Mummy Porn' http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/29/tv-review-sex-story-50-shades-of-grey_n_1717230.html BDSM bondage and discipline sadism...

Put the book back on the table. I'm having trouble. I think it is a preposition.

Here's my problem: I've been confused about the placement of adverbs in present/past perfect phrases. For example, which sentence would sound better: "We had been slowly drifting down the river when a bear attacked." or "We had slowly been drifting down the river when a bear attacked." Personally, I'd go with the former, and this led me to believe that if the sentence contains both "had been" and a verb, the adverb should be placed after "had been"--if the adverb is indeed modifying the verb. This, however, led to me to think of other uses of the present/past perfect, where another verb isn't present. The is the best example I could formulate: "He has always been an academic and a charitable person." See, right there, always --an adverb of frequency--was placed in between has and been . Does this mean only adverbs of frequency (e.g., always , usually , etc.) should be placed in between such constructs? A final example t...

In the OED, are definitions that don't explicitly indicate it is figurative use always with literal examples only, or can they be figurative? My recent answer has caused quite some confusion among high rep users, apparently because they think that my answer makes no sense, and the OED is listing figurative examples without saying so. e.g. "speak for" To indicate; to betoken. 1832 Philol. Museum I. 335 The great mass of evidence that speaks for an intimate affinity between the Pelasgians and the Hellenes. is this literal use?