Discussion Groups / English Usage / June 2008

I couldn't find this in the English dictionaries I have or on the Web:
"strephopode."
Does it exist in the OED?
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Is the following sentence correct, if "their" refers to John, Tom, and
Bill?
Neither John nor Tom nor Bill but Mary knows their addresses.
I'd appreciate your help.

From Wikipedia’s entry for Red Hook, a neighborhood of Brooklyn:
Red Hook's current eclectic mix of living artists and industrial
businesses create a neighborhood coined "Residustrial" in 2008 by
artist and resident John P. Missale. [end excerpt]

I wonder who did the licensing of such bulls in those years, 60 years
ago or thereabouts?
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Kelly's kept an unlicensed bull, well away

What is the origin of  the phrase "high jinks" ?

Mike, together with John and Bill, have/has built that house.
Should I use "have" or "has"?

How do you feel about the "no longer" here?
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In the almost daily rush of revelations, it is not easy for the numbed
citizen to keep in mind the full enormity of "Watergate."  Despite ample

I'm writing a poem that has a few lines containing:
X and Y and Z
as opposed to
X, Y, and Z.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24893447/
the NERVE of that Veronica Penny of Canada, trying to play all cutesy
by hiding her head in her hands for every single word that she was
given - even the most simple ones.  it came back to bite her

In the following sentence, what does "when" mean?
"When people get married in Japan, They sometimes have the ceremony at
a shrine."
a) at the time that

Does the verb "fire" only apply to gun bullets and other explosive
propelled devices or can it also apply to other things such as beams,
radiation and other things?
For example people usually say "He fired the gun" but is it possible

I noticed in a book that I'm reading at the moment, the author used a colon
in this manner:
How bad would it be? That was the great question, always followed by number
two: How long would it last?

Here is another example from my paper, which I discussed with the
proofreader. I wrote:
"Other flexible forms known from the econometric tradition (Translog or
Diewert) can locally represent arbitrary production or cost functions as

What are "list shoes?" Shoes made of cutout pieces, of strips, of some
stuff?
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The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure

In an article in today's Guardian, the chairman of HSBC is quoted
using "secular" to mean "permanent" or "fundamental":
(quote)
Stephen Green, chairman of Britain's biggest bank, HSBC, yesterday