Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2007

I see many times my professor, a native AE and very careful person in
writing, writes " an FFT" in his lectures. As I understand it, it should be
a FFT because "F" is not a vowel. I suspect maybe the rule of "an" and "a"
usage is different when using with an abbereviation. Please ...

It's spelled "IN-DICK'T-MENT", but it's pronounced "IN-DITE-MENT".
Thereby making it one of the dumnest words in the English language.

Can anyone please ive me some serious examples of technical collective
nouns? The only ones I can think of are:
"A kit of tools", and "a bank of batteries". I somethow thing that wireless
(radio) "set" counts.

"A contract employee at a nuclear material cleanup site in Tennessee
was charged Thursday with allegedly stealing classified data about
enriching uranium to sell to foreign governments, law enforcement

Tory Community Cohesion spokesman Dominic Grieve boasting on R4's Any
Questions this evening:
       "I do diversity for the party."
Comments?

I'm not sure this is the correct forum for this post, but I'm hoping
some of my British friends will help me out.
We're all familiar with the obvious ones:  biscuit vs cookie;
knackered vs exhausted; etc.

I am unable to understand some English jokes. This seems to be one of
them. My calculus professor said this in middle of a lecture. Can
anyone give me some background, and why wouldn't you tell anyone?
Lecture -- Joke.

I found on Wikipedia a definition below.
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM,
that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase
or name.

What does "X is one of the only Ys" mean?  I can understand "X is one of
only two (etc) Ys", but I can make no sense of "X is one of the only Ys"
which I hear in speech and read not infrequently.

This is from a newspaper article about a bush, known to farmers as the
condom shrub, that produces latex. Since the quote is from a spoken
comment, I assume the punctuation is the newspaper's, so ignore the
comma splice. Mr. Verwey is the owner/spokesman for the American company

Which one is correct?
1. Prepare your message, we will deliver for you.
2. Prepare your message for us, we will deliver for you.
3. Have your message prepared,  we will deliver for you.

Yesterday, on a TV news program, I heard a news staffer talking about
someone who submitted his (or her) resignation. The term the staffer
used -- about three times -- was "resignate."
Anyone else heard this term? Is it on the verge of becoming common?

A discussion arose in sci.lang.japan, of all places, about whether
"nonsense" can be treated as a countable noun. A non-native speaker had
said that something was "a nonsense." I, a Canadian, told him that
"nonsense" was not a countable noun, but then the Brits and Aussies

"The BBC Trust has offered to meet with open source advocates who argue
that the corporation has a duty to make the download service platform
agnostic."
Agnostic?

From http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/07/apples-iphone-p.html
[...]
Research firm iSuppli calculated the bill of goods for the iPhone and
concluded that it costs $265.83 to make each 8GB handset. With a sales price