Discussion Groups / English Usage / October 2007

I can't find a good place to hang this message in the "Fun with closed captions"
thread, so I'm starting a thread of my own....
This scene from the movie "The Frisco Kid" illustrates the universality of folk
dancing...Gene Wilder plays a Polish rabbi in the mid-19th century who ...

I've come across a phrase that surprises me because it's
simple, terse, probably quite useful, and entirely new to
me.  It's "jump pages", referring to reading articles in
newspapers.

Ever avail yourself of the service of a tout?
Did it work out OK?
I had good hotel experiences with touts
in Amsterdam, Milan and Athens.

"Like Byron" at Missolonghi, Jack London was slowly killed by the
mistakes of the medical men who treated him.
A.       Like Byron
B.       Like Byron's death

This may be slightly off topic, forgive me.
I was in my 3rd grader's class and saw a poster with cursive writing.
The capital 'Q' looked like like an O with a tail at the bottom.
I recall a capital Q looking more like the number 2, and a Google search

Can anyone think of a _second_ minimal pair for these, other than
'serious' vs 'Sirius'?

What is the meaning of "goat leap" in:
On one end of street was the Delaware River to jump into when he felt
like a goat leap." Also has "out of the blue" any other meaning
besides "unexpectedly"?

Those who followed the arguments in the "registered independents"
thread may be interested in a case which was argued before the United
States Supreme Court today, captioned "Washington State Grange
v. Washington State Republican Party and Washington v. Washington

http://slightlygutted.blogspot.com/
Slightly Gutted - the home of Qualified Absolutes
So the blog is begun. I blogged a charity bike ride a few months ago
and enjoyed having the platform. So after years of threatening to put

Two university teachers in Columbus share a surname that seems quite
appropriate, given the opinion of Dave Gorman (and others) about the
cityfolk. Sum their phone numbers (excluding area codes).
---

in (the) winter
Do I need the article "the"?
Thank you in advance.

"I hate cooking" declared our dinner companion the other night.
After a while she said that she is a great baker and she loves baking
apple pies.
I'm talking about a native speaker of English, who is not a liar, or a

I'm starting to wonder whether Yusuf Gursey's posts ever contain more
new text than quoted text.
Yusuf's messages are just too short for me.  It is for this reason
that I am constantly getting tired of posting questions about the

I heard a person on a TV show pronounce the "vivre" part as "veeve",
but M-W gives a different pronunciation:
http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joie%20de%20vivre
And the American Heritage Dictionary gives yet another pronunciation:

In a song by DJ Bobo, some of the lyrics are:
"There's a party over there, life is a glare"
What does it mean?