Discussion Groups / English Usage / April 2009

Cross posted to news:alt.usgae.english and
news:uk.media.tv.misc
Just been watching the start of "Natural World"
on BBC TWO--available using the watch again

When she's a "commercial sex worker" or "sex worker." That appears to be
the term in India. Is it used elsewhere?

I'm not belittling the difficulty of writing live TV captions in what is
daftly known as "real time", but they can be very funny. It occurs to
me, though, that because they must be produced so rapidly the mistakes
which appear must to some extent reflect what the captioneer ...

The mode of this hebdomadal review
Precludes all introductional excess.
The digest must commence without ado,
Resisting all temptation to digress.

Dear members,
I am not sure about the meaning of "at the core of this" in the
following sentence:
"At the core of this you will find the information about best fares,

Catching up with this week's episode of The Apprentice, I was puzzled by
Sir Alan telling one of the contestants that he could certainly "bunny
off a scratch". Googling on this phrase offers 17 hits, most of which
are Tweets following the programme asking what it might mean.

What is the meaning of "run-out" here?
----
[after a heavy snowfall]
The snow had passed and on the west side of Lundgen Road five children

I recently found a page on the Web that discusses how the chemical
element "oxygen" (from the Greek for "acid producer") was named:
# Lavoisier had recently assigned this name to the new gaseous element
# that Joseph Priestly had discovered a few years earlier as the

Is the expression "a cheap date" an insult or a compliment?
Discuss!

Hello to everyone,
i am given a text excerpt from newspaper and i have to answer some
comprehension questions.
Are all the following phrases CORRECT and EQUIVALENT in meaning?

A Late Shakespearean Sonnet
This poem is inspired by a bard,
The late Sir Francis Bacon (undebunked).
By "late" I don't mean "coming in retard"

I just finished Brian van de Mark's Pandora's Keepers.  The choices for
what should come next are
Charlie Wilson's War
See No Evil (from Syriana)

I am to write about stereotypes in British English and Scottish English
and have made the thesis below, but I am not satisfied with it. It
doesn't seem to clearify what I am thinking of.
For example, many words that Scots consider typically Scottish are

I have written a list of my job's duties (I work as a Financial
Analyst for an Energy company). Can you take a look and help me find
out any thing unsmooth, unclear, and not good.
Thanks.

We all know how a dead metaphor can suddenly come to life when
used in an unfortunate context. I found the same thing happening
to a preposition in the following:
"It is remarkable that the ceremonial building remained intact