Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2008

We've done this time and time again...I think there's even a FAQ entry on it,
with things like "cleave together" and "cleave asunder", and verbal "dust"
meaning both "to remove dust from" and "to add dust to"....
What I haven't seen covered in much detail is pairs of words that are ...

to  an all-you-can-eat haggis buffet, ...?

The overall theme of fashion for Fall 2005 is an air of drama. Black
is back, coats are dramatic, and smart tailoring is going to be huge.
Black is back in a big way - well for most of us it never went away.
The stores will be filled with delicious eveningwear particularly

When I look into your eyes
I can see a love restrained
But darlin' when I hold you
Don't you know I feel the same

Getting the decision to start shaving your pubic hair is easy. Doing
it is a bit more difficult.
Using the guidelines in this article, you will find that pubic hair
shave can be a simple task. First, is your pubic hair shave decision

Found in The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal
today:*
========================================
Best of the Web Today - January 21, 2008

Shoes and women are two combination of style and fashion. They are
always be together in happy and sad. That's why never leave women in
shoes store, they might buy any shoes they see. Eventhough, there are
some women who are fussy about their shoes, and unsatisfied with shoes

Is this
"there was no brick of [Ernest's] prison to be loosened by"
an idiom?
----

Sometime in the past year there has been a discussion
here about 'talk English' vs. 'speak English,' with some
people questioning, IIRC, whether 'talk English' is normal
English.

Requiring users to correctly enter the text from the image below is
  one of the ways MySpace can protect it's users from spam.
Type the misspelled word here _____ and the corrected spelling here _____.
  [CAPTCHA.aspx?SecurityToken=9490BA152E0044E7B8A91DBD61A52FBE&dl=50]

Re:
"It is the making us consider"
I think I an reasonably understand this para:
a) without the "the" in the above, thus

A blogifier named Crawford Kilian, at
http://tinyurl.com/2xm4ad *, suggests a difference in
connotation between "speak" and "talk" that seems reasonable
to me.  (I can't be sure, but I think he's Canadian.)

It is my understanding that the word "rare" in the sense of "unusual
or hard to find" is not used all that much in the spoken language.  In
my experience, people often use the word "unusual" in conversation,
but not "rare".  Now, why use a word of four syllables when one of one

This may be valid only in older BrE (and AmE, as shown in the 2nd
quotation), but I'm not sure.
Is the "should" in the first quotation mandatory, i.e. not replaceable
by "would?"

This was a Warner Bros. Western from 1957.
If you wrote Warner Bros.' ' West of the River', would that be correct
punctuation?
Nick