Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

Has anyone else seen Roy Blount's fascinating new book, "Alphabet
Juice"? He seems to cover most of the last years' discussions in this
group and describes "The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letter, Words,
and Combinations Thereof: Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips and

They tell you one shouldn't use cliches such as "all the tea in China,"
but suppose your story takes place in the early 18th century when the
East Indian company was just beginning its massive exportation of China Tea?
The expression "all the tea in china" would not have been a ...

I'm becoming annoyed at the use of "whose" for inanimate objects and
animals.  "The computer, whose hard drive had just died...." is an
example.  To me, "who" refers to a person and "which" refers to non-
persons.  So, the correct construction would be "The computer, which

Not long ago we had a thread (under the misleading subject line "Settle
an argument about prepositional phrases") about whether the expression
"one in four businesses" was to be construed as singular or plural.
Some people disagreed with others.

Sorry, I just couldn't resist the subject.
Not having Marius' elevated tastes, I'm currently reading Dean Koontz (I
remember him when he had an 'R')'s "The Husband".   On page 7 I find
"What happened was some w.nker, not even a surfer, just a wannabe

Todd,
I am stunned by this news, too. Had you not the wisdom to put Dennis
in the subject, it might have stayed in
my suspect mail filter!  Thank you for telling me. I will relay to the

Any reasons for the "shall/will" pair here?
Is it mandatory, or can we swap them?
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[Naphta talking]

People,
The pharagraph below will appear on a web questionnaire just before a
question appears.
I have the following requests:

Could anyone please tell me the meaning of "initializing" in the
following sentence:
"World map is initializing".
The text is about online airline ticketing.

I was reading "The Returning of the Melting Pot" by Arthur
Schlesinger.
The article is available on this page:
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0101/article_8.shtml

Is this
"In the service of the cure"
an idiom, used about medical treatments?
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Which form of citation is correct？
According to Wood and Kroger (2000: 117), “discourse patterns may
be ...... ”
OR

Whither goest the limerick?  Most dictionaries have the poetic form as
humorous – but here it is, after Madoff made off with the life savings
of a suicide. as a dirge:
--

cuz a decade ago usenet was infested with grammar learnt at school
whinoes...

"ch." is fine for the singular. But how about the plural? "chh."? or
"chs."?  The only reason why I would even remotely consider the
possibility of the first option is by analogy with the plural
abbreviation for pages, "pp," although "chs." does look more normal.