Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

How about:
"putting him under the sod": kill him?
"you're a goner": you're going to die?
"to toddle off": ?

"Thus Hans Castorp."
Does this mean
"Thus Hans Castorp proclaimed."
?

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

Hi!  Would you please tell me the meanings of the verbs reverse and
correct in the following expression?
Some new technologies generate unexpected, harmful side effects that
cannot be reversed or corrected.

The ever entertaining Lucy Kellaway lists her awards for the Top Twaddle
 of management-speak in 2008 at
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3a41f80a-d8d3-11dd-ab5f-000077b07658.html
I particularly like the "Nouns Moonlighting As Verbs"...

I don't quite get
"to which commend him."
Is "commend" a subjunctive here?
----

In the US it is customary to measure the fuel efficiency of a car in
units of miles per (US) gallon or MPG.  And here in Canada when I was
a boy, we also used MPG (but with Imperial gallons, of course).
Today our government has opted to have us use fuel consumption units,

I've lost track of the number of times I've heard something like
"Today's weather forecast calls for snow and freezing rain, with
temperatures in the low 20s."
Now a message from some financial guru (forwarded by our investment

gendo - a way of language
eliminating linguistic obstacles to waking up
   from the millennia-old hallucination
          humans call "reality"

Ukrainians:
     <..........watch this space..........>
The Poor Jews:
     05.01.2009 BBC1 "The Diary Of Anna Frank: Epsiode 1"

I've just been reading my friend Christine Janson's blog about the public
(ab)use of English these days,
<http://ccjcrotchets.blogspot.com/>,
and some of her upcoming articles that I was privileged to read in advance of

Every Christmas season, my husband sends cards/letters to two of his
Army buddies. Mike, who was the Best Man at our wedding, lived in
Pennsylvania. Nevarez, whom I've never met, lived in New Mexico. The
three guys had kept in touch ever since their Army days ended in 1962;

Ukrainians:
     <..........watch this space..........>
The Poor Jews:
     06.01.2009 BBC1 "The Diary Of Anna Frank: Episode 2"

My fellow racists (Whites only),
    Such is the sensitivity, that Brits seem as
reluctant to talk about the subject as they are
baffled by it.

Dear people in the US,
I would like to ask an important question.
I am carrying out a web questionniare about retirement and I indciate some
income amounts in the web questionnaire.