Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Jenkins (the writer) came recently to this boarding house in France and
is still in it.
Thus, wouldn't
"not many days after I had _first_ been in the house"

1. "He had not colours?" Did students wear any distinctive signs,
indicative  of academic performance or association with a form, group, etc?
2. "Games," is this BrE for "sports?" I don't think it means "matches?"
3. "Rigger," is this "gear," or simply "(rowing) boat?"

In the following webpage:
http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~eclark/maple_or_mathematica.html
I encountered such a sentence:
In brief, Maple represents The Force, and Mathematica is often

What is a private?
By EBEN HARRELL Eben Harrell – Tue Apr 28, 5:40 am ET
In February 1976, an outbreak of swine flu struck Fort Dix Army base
in New Jersey, killing a 19-year-old private and infecting hundreds of

My proofreading client has written this in the caption to a diagram:
"Relationship among the four aspects of stakeholder theory"
OK, he's obviously learnt, quite correctly, that you can only be
'between' two things and not more, but I think this is screaming out to

Found  on the BBC:
[quotes]
Sutherland charged with assault
...

There was a big heading in the Wall Street Journal (on 5/7/09):
"Some Investors Bet on Treasurys".
I understand that the WSJ never makes any mistake on printing catch words.
Are Treasuries and Treasurys interchangeable?

Can any of you tell me in detail why "hopefully" is not considered proper
english.
If it means "it is hoped," then why is that improper?

Hi to all,
can you please provide me some synonyms of the phrase
"it is widely believed"?
Thanks in advance

Would you consider "far distant" one of those accepted redundancies?
-------
Templer I could not see, because he sat on the same side of the aisle as
myself and was too far distant to be visible from my place.

Came across an article today on football chants;  it was much more
interesting than I expected it to be.
(I liked the "Koreans-dogs-Scousers-rats" one;  offensive, for sure,
but funny trumps offensive.)

Does anyone have any idea why, in modern novels, the practice of using
inverted commas (aka "quotes" or "speech marks") to denote direct
speech is dying out?  I'm currently reading "God's Own Country" by
Ross Raisin, and jolly good it is too, but it's not the first

"Case" used in BrE to mean a dozen bottles of wine; now it appears generally
(certainly in supermarket-speak) to mean six. When did the new sense appear?
(One need hardly ask why.)
Alan Jones

Would anyone please explain how to use "of what" correctly.
I have been searching through Internet and hoping to find some
answers, but failed.
Are there any rules of using "of what"  which I can follow. For

I'm tired of hearing the problem "defined away". We give the
problem a catchy title "toxic assets", and the problem is half
solved, by identifying the cause of the problem as "toxic assets".
All we have do now is find a way of getting rid of the "toxic