Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2009

See the following sentence:
The shell forks for command substitution, pipelines, process
substitution (for shells supporting that), commands grouped with
parentheses.

The army has just defused a bomb in Northern Ireland. Their spokeamn
said that the bomb "appeared to be viable". While I know what they
mean, it doesn't strike me as an ideal choice of word. It seems that
vast swathes of vocabulary have been rendered obsolete in some

why do we precede it with a comma?
Ex:  We can meet in Room #305 for our briefing, then we can walk two
classrooms over to room #303.
Ex:  I worked all day at the elementary school, then I went home, then

"For although she had long been tutored in French, she had yet conversed
with a native French speaker."

Ladies and Gentlemen:
What follows is the poem by Emily Dickinson.
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I never hear the word “escape”