Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

Hi. Recently I posted something on this site and was roundly criticized
for my writing. One of the members even said that my grammar,syntax and
diction showed that I was a rank beginner. Being as this is not the
case, and I have been learning and using English for at least 20 years,

Is this "porely" Southern dialect for "poor"?
Or "purely?"
----
One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come and

My dad may be taking me out for a holiday dinner tomorrow, and I unwittingly
selected a Cafe Trattoria close to where I live. The Merriam-Webster
definition, in terms of classifying trattoria as a type, is deplorable.
How much does the American edition of the OED go for these ...

Being that time of year I have a festive question.
Both the words partyer and partier are listed by dictionary.com:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/partier
However I haven't found either of these two words in any other on-line

Is ok to write: "He had no reason to hide, but still _chose to_"?

Brave new world? As of early Sunday
morning, while editing my Web site
"What News?", it looked like the
meaning of "state funeral" in the

Hello, I am fifteen years old, and I am babysitting some children. They
have a habit of bed wetting. Their parents believe that this problem
can be solved by praying to God before sleeping. Unfortunately, they
have asked me to teach their children such a prayer. I found one prayer

http://www.ou.edu/cas/psc/booksocrates.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=6NoPabBYcgAC&dq=four+texts+on+socrates&pg=PP1&o
ts=ALym2s58-v&sig=VOse4SZV4LvvMXdmFO4JG8aNFUU&prev=http://www.google.com/search%
3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dfour%2Btexts%2Bon%2Bsocrates&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1#PPA7 ...

I was watching an old episode of British chat show Parkinson the other day.
His guest is Liza Minnelli, who’s about to sing a Charles Aznavour song
accompanied by Laurie Holloway on piano. She says that he played at the
Palladium with Judy Garland (Liza’s mother) and herself. But ...

Well, I have been here before and introduced myself. I hope to improve
my grammar by learning all my mistakes and how to fix them including
what to focus on and study in my many grammar books. Its been a while
since I posted two months or so ago. So I here is a paragraph to my

Are there similiar proverbs have the same meaning as:
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know
for sure that just
ain't so."

Windows Media Player 11 Released
click here to download
(http://downloadhub.uni.cc/category/detail.php?id=5951)
Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP offers great new ways to store

Could you please let me know, which of the following sentences is
correct:
a.) Tomorrow, after we are back from Bangkok ...
b.) Tomorrow, after we came back from Bangkok ...

Hi. Recently, I said on one of my posts here that a certain phrase had
'inured' in the language, and was admonished for this offbeat use of
'inure' - quite justly,it seemed at the time. But later, I found that I
was able to organise a rather fair defense of this use of the word. The

I was reading some posting, and I  came across  one posted by jinhyun:
Criticize this piece of writing. He was lemnting the fact that some of
the users here didn't like his writing, and he is not cultured enough.
In any event I decided to check his older post - and I notice that he