Discussion Groups / English Usage / August 2008

Can you help me with the distinction between "ascertainable" vs
"discernable"?
Auction-rate securities fraud is the news today so I looked up auction-rate
securitities on Wikipedia (

Could someone tell me which of the following sentences is the correct
one. Or could they both be correct?
a. Click on the link below.
b. Click the link below.

A Newbie Just Saying Hello!
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Henry Diaz --
network marketing lead generation and

Was and were, which one should I use?  Please explain a little bit.
Thanks.
There was/were rain and thunders.
There was/were lots of rain and thunders.

Hello !  Would you please tell me the difference, if any, between the
two sentences (1) and (2) and (3)?
(1)  Recent research has revealed only one significant difference, in
terms of content, between male and female gossip: men spend much more

Noel Gallagher has been reported as saying: "Guardian spotty herberts
piss me off."
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/08/noel_guardian_spotty_herberts.html
I think I get his general meaning --he doesn't like what's been written

Could one dispense with "be",  for:
"She did indeed look as if she might."
Also, could one say:
"She did indeed look as if she might have."

"The elderly woman was given the treat after telling staff
 it was her fantasy to be served her favourite meal by a man
 naked apart from the skimpy underwear."
http://www.telegraph.co ...

Interesting article by David McKie in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/history.youngpeople
http://tinyurl.com/5oynxh
"For some time now I have regularly writhed, inwardly howled, and, even at

In Deutsch, numbers 21-99 (other than 30, 40, ...) are read as "one
and twenty, two and twenty, ...". My German instructor mentioned that
English had the same construct back in the day. Can anyone confirm or
deny this? If English did have this construct, when and why did it

Gordon Lightfoot's _Cherokee Bend_ talks about "the land of the Spirit Kin"
and has a woman saying she's going to go there when she dies. Is that a
standard English translation of a concept you're familiar with? (This woman
is Cherokee, so you might not be.)

On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:15:07 -0400, Fred Doyle <fdoyle1@nycap.rr.com>
wrote:

I'm working on a prose story at the moment and my editer has picked me
up for having certain characters refer to certain other characters as
'babe' or 'sweetheart'. I maintain that no initial capital is
necessary; my editer maintains otherwise. Just to muddly the waters, I

Is this "take up airs" still in use?
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The genesis of most firearms control legislation lays in the fact that
government types and societal elites don’t like the masses to have

Can an expression, "It's a company account, XYZ," possibly be a fixed
phrase meaning, in effect, "Bill the XYZ company." ? Is this a common
way to express the idea?
Thank you,