Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Hello friends:
I've always found it a little odd that the key on the telephone which
looks like this -- # -- is called the "pound key," and the symbol on
it is called "the pound sign".

This is something of a theoretical question. I'm just curious.
In an utterance like "Hello, mum!", what is the grammatical role of "mum"?
Is she a subject, an object, or something else? More specifically, if I
wandered into a darkened room of drunkards* and exclaimed "Hello, ...

Let me see if I'm right in my assumptions:
1.
"that would not be I"
means

I have heard this expression "naked lunch" somewhere, but what does it
mean?  (I don't mean literarly, but in reality)

Is it correct to say "John recommnded and Mary read the book" to mean
"John recommnded the book and Mary read it"?

A fleet of 11 fire engines worth £1.3m and belonging to the national
Fire Service College in Gloucestershire has been destroyed in a blaze.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/8053733.stm
--

Questions:
1. "And in this flea our two bloods mingled be"
I guess "be" in such older texts can only be seen as "are/is" and not as
the subjunctive, right?

Hi to all,
I came up with the following phrase:
". in order for someone to free himself from smoking addiction..".
Shouldn't it have been written as?

Does anyone here know the English word for someone who hates or
loathes themself?
Thanks in advance.

From the BBC site:
"A man wearing an Iraqi military uniform shoots dead two US soldiers and
injures three others in the city of Mosul, reports say."
I think I would have written, "A man wearing an Iraqi military uniform

Looking for a word that isn't 'ironic' or 'ironically.'
Let's say - to invent an example - an established form of entertainment
such as traditional hand-drawn 2D film animation is stagnating. A new
form such as 3D computer animation comes along and delivers the death

Is this the original text: http://www.fleurdelis.com/desiderata.htm?
At the end of second paragraph, it says
"they are vexatious to the spirit".Shouldn't it be
"vexations" instead of "vexatious"?

Is there a word in English that means "no longer relevant"? The context is a
reserve that a company has set aside against the possibility of something
happening in the future. That event hasn't taken place and no longer can so
the reserve is no longer relevant--it's ___.  I don't ...

Hi !  I would like to know the meaning of the phrase ***account for***
in the following passage.
The increase in female employment has also ***accounted for*** a large
part of global growth in recent decades.   GDP growth can come from

At the recommendation of my chiropractor [1], I recently watched the movie
"Changeling", starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Clint Eastwood...over the
course of nearly 2½ hours, I noticed two glaring instances of what I think my be
linguistic anachronisms: