Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2008

I've got quite a few aue-related photos, scans, etc., a few of which I
uploaded here http://dadge.fotopic.net/c154143.html a while back. I'm going
to start adding them all to a new blog at http://dadge.wordpress.com/.
The first scan (warning: 800kb) is some advice from 1929.

I was writing a sentence the the other day, but I wasn't entirely sure
on which way was best to write it.   Could someone please tell me
which of the two sentences is the most "correct".    I was just
wondering if I should leave out  the word "who" in beginning the 3rd

Continuing the slow cooker thread... I have a recipe for Irish Coddle
that looks quite good. It calls for pork sausages. What, in the US,
would that mean? Is it made with the type of breakfast sausages I've had
in Irish restaurants in the US -- the thick, bready kind -- and if so,

Is this
"His hand was against them, and theirs against him"
perhaps an (old) idiom?
---

Let me ask about this phrase: if for no other reason than
I see this phrase often, but don't find  dictionaries even for non-
natives listing it.
Here is an example sentence.

Would
"And what shall it be to drink?"
still be used today in the UK?
Also, is the reason for the presence of "shall" in this context the idea

I'm an English learner. I can't tell the difference between the
following two sentences:
Sentence 1: The door has been opened.
Sentence 2: The door is already opened.

Etymologies for idioms are notoriously difficult, but I'll postulate a
possible one for "clean as a hound's tooth."  My researches, after
failing in many different efforts, came up with two sightings in the
NYTimes in 1897, one looking like a pre-idiom source and the other

"Cough into their armpits?"
What would this mean? That they're not properly washed, don't attend to
personal hygiene?
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Heard in the wild:
1. "...chanting at the bit."
2. "Leaving thru the pages..."
And this one, a bit different:

I wonder what an "E.W.D. land barge" is.
-----
From the street outside came the sound of a dumpster being emptied into
an E.W.D. land barge.

A 19th-century journalist, James Greenwood, wrote this about the
'cellar-dwellers' of Dudley Street:
'... many families, consisting of mother, father, and a more or less
numerous swarm of big and little children, passed their lives in these

I wonder if in the first quotation there shouldn't be as well a "should"
as in the 2nd?
-----
Born with severe physical disabilities doctors believed he would

Have come accros this word in a Poem by Walt Whitman, 'up-buoying',
what does it mean?
Hope someone can enlighten me...
Tom

Please let me know whether there is something amiss about the
following sentence.  I want to say that I bumped into three
butterflies, but not all at the same time, each about a min apart:
"I bumped into a butterfly along a road for three times last Sunday.