Discussion Groups / English Usage / December 2008

The following sentence is from a user manual for a cash management
software:
"To be populated only if intercompany is used from
GLCompany,CompanyID"  (Here GL is General Ledger)

I have a question about this sentence:
"You are supposed to _have done_ your homework."
Is it unremarkable to you? (Something you'd say to your kids?)
To be precise, is it expressed/heard/read often in your daily lives?

Disasters.
Just got the alumni newsletter from University of Birmingham, and found
an article about an aue alumnus who has a new book published:
https://bhamalumni.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=433

Today's (12/18/08) Washington Post Metro section  had a headline with a
picture: "Sex Workers Stage Downtown Rally". I wonder that they used the
mealy-mouthed term "sex worker". What's wrong with "whore" or perhaps
"prostitute"?

ALARMED at the increasing use of English in everyday life,
     Germans are debating whether to enshrine the national
     language in the country's constitution.
     The American writer Mark Twain, in his 1880 essay

When the term "electric guitar" became nearly as popular as the
original unmodified word "guitar", the term "acoustic guitar" emerged
because "guitar" (unmodified) was considered ambiguous. "Acoustic
guitar" is labeled the retronym. What is "electric guitar" labeled?

Hi! I just wanted to make sure I understand the term correctly.
Let's say there are 4 releases of an application: 1, 2, 3, 4. I get support
for the latest one (4) and for the immediately preceding one, which in this
case is version 3 right?

Hello !  I have trouble figuring out what the phrase ***it wasn't
always so*** means in the following context.
Restaurant workers in the United States make more than twenty-five
billion dollars a year in tips, so it’s natural that people think of

William Safire's Rules for Writers:
* Remember to never split an infinitive.
* The passive voice should never be used.
* Do not put statements in the negative form.

What is chest-puffing?
I took it from here:
http://www.brazzilrace.com/viewtopic.php?t=36&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=150

Does a beard "come in" or "come out?"
---
[Two old geezers, one of them, Father Tom, a Catholic priest, run off
to Florida and have fun. Tom didn't have a beard before.]

I'm teaching English at the moment to Asian students, and I teach that
there's two forms of the present tense, one for "repeated actions",
and one for "something done once". For instance, you'd have:
* Everyday, I eat food

I saw the verb "hear" can be used with "v-ing" as well as "bare
infinitive". But what's difference of these usage?
For example: two clauses is correct:
- He could hear a dog barking.

Hoping someone can help me understand what the writer (Kathleen Paker)
means in this sentence snippet
"Among his other activities, Blagojevich -- whose Dickensian name
rings nearly eponymous -- "

The first reading for "if not" here is "even  though."
Do you feel that "and even" might be a possibility too, perhaps by
changing a bit the context; say she thinks better of her job.
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