Discussion Groups / English Usage / August 2008

I would like to ask your thought about an issue:
I am writing an article. Sometimes I am having a hard time to express in
english what
I intend to say. It happens sometimes that an article uses a phrase that

Jan Freeman writing in today’s Boston Globe discusses the different
speeds at which lies and the truth travel, bringing up a common mis-
attribution to Mark Twain.  To get the correct attribution I found a
fairly new word-blog by one Ralph Keyes to be helpful, at

Twice today I've seen the word "relay" used to mean "tell" and I'm wondering
whether this isn't a mistake (or eggcorn) for "relate".
Google "relayed" and see what you think.
Adrian

A colleague of mine has just given birth to a baby boy. This is their
second baby boy. I want to write them a congratulations letter for the
occasion. I've never written such a letter and my how-to references
don't give me a clue either.

I have noticed in the past few years that when we are asked to stand
for the national anthem (of Canada or the US, but in a Canadian
venue), the request is more often than not accompanied by a request to
"remove your headwear".

What tense to use when you describe (say, in a paper) the plan that
you had made for some period in the past.
For example:
Jan 2000, we made a plan for our company in the first quarter of 2000

Thanks for the erudite responses to my previous question.
I have always been told - perhaps by pedants - that a sentence such as, "The
garden party was cancelled due to heavy rain" is incorrect grammatically due
to the usage of 'due to'.

I am interested to discover the provenance of this expression and its
current meaning.
I - who am in Cape Town, South Africa - first encountered this
expression last week when I was on a course, and a fellow delegate

The word "unwieldy" is commonly misspelled as "unwieldly." Is this always an
error or a somewhat acceptable matter of usage? As I said I've run into it
lots.

The course nvolves gradual changes in age, income, and work hours.
Do we need a comma before 'and' or not?
The OXfrod dictionary was mentioning that there should be a comma before
and,

Sometimes slang, or new words, capture a feeling better than
traditional words. I think that "lifequake" falls into that special
category.
Earthquakes remain a concern for people living in many places,

A documentary about the traditional herbal beverage of Gods own
country
Watch the video . . .
http://www.emalayalee.co.uk/getvideo.php?cat=5&article=339