Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

The residents can now avoid the humiliation of living in Butt
Hole Road, following a change of address to the apostropheless
Archers Way, an allusion to a nearby medieval castle:
http://www.dailymail.co ...

Marius and others may like to seek out a good programme just aired as
part of BBCTV's poetry season: Simon Schama and the wonderful Fiona Shaw
on John Donne.
Milton and Beowulf follow in the next couple of days.

Dear (especially American) People,
I am going to carry out a questionnaire on American people. One of the most
important, and the one I am having difficulty to formulate, question is
stated below. My aim is to figure out the 'to be revealed' or 'revealed'

Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am bugging you this time with a trivial test question in a public
test in Taiwan.
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Ladies and Gentlemen:
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The Cambridge International Corpus (CIC) is a very large collection of
English texts, stored in a computerised database, which can be

My last question about a Scots expression is "upatra burd" - what is the
meaning? I know the word "burd" which is a 'bird' = lassie, but upatra?
If you know the answer, please tell me.
Arne H. Wilstrup

In Danish we say about a fabulous save performed by a goalie that
it was a fever save. I am wondering if there is an expression in
English involving something with "fever"?
If there isn't in sports, then maybe in another area, but still

In the Irish Catholic sex/physical abuse scandal, for some reason the
word "myriad" keeps appearing.
One article, "Ireland's myriad religious orders, much like their
mother church, [....]"

Is there anything wrong with the following sentence?
"Whenever you went, I would find you."
I heard this in a British movie.

The biggest scandal of the last decade !!!!!!!
Millions of Sony digital cameras sold with
accidentally built-in X-ray emitters that
cause immediate brain cancer !!!!!!

I heard a politician say this yesterday:
"He along with I inspected the floods on a number of occasions."
It doesn't look right, even though "along with" is synonymous with "and". What
do you think?

I had a linguistic argument with a friend of mine who has lived for 15 years
in Palm Beach, Florida. He is not a native AmE speaker but he does speak
very decent English, and that's for sure. I wanted to show off a bit with my
knowledge of slang so going to the restroom for a ...

On this webpage:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/TextEditor/index.html,
I've seen the following sentence :
For all of our friends who insist that notepad is l33t and who refuse

I have just come across the wonderfully named Sir Abstrupus Danby. Or
possibly that should be Sir Anstrupus Danby - different web pages give
both versions. He lived in the early 18th century, and had a son of
the same name, who was "of Swinton, Yorkshire". It doesn't seem to

At the moment there is a lot of fuss about the expenses claimed by
members of the UK Parliament.
We are coming up to the elections on June 4th for UK members of the
European Parliament and for some local government councillors in