Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

Hi !  Would you please tell me the meaning of the phrasal verb
***account for*** in the following passage?
Factories account for less than 10 percent of the polluting agents of
rivers in the US.

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First, some background music, Maestro
http://www.nurple.com/sideshow/
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Sometime in the past many years, someone in AUE has brought up the
movie line "But dear, if we had waited till we could afford it, we
wouldn't even HAVE a piano."  Someone else has said, IIRC, it's from
"Palm Beach Story," spoken by Claudette Colbert. I recently watched

There was an incident during a match in the the Wimbledon tennis
championships yesterday when a player, Michael Llodra, injured himself
and had to forfeit the match. His opponent then entertained the crowd by
playing against the ball boys (one at a time) and then a ball girl. In

Just heard a British TV reporter on Sky News talking about the death of
Michael Jackson saying something about "the plans that they will drawr up for
his funeral"
I've heard "withdrawral" plenty of times before, but not "drawr" on its own.

Just portmanteau it:
    How clean is your house?
    I'm fastidious about cleanliness and personal hygiene - I simply
    hate bad smells and squalor. I owned 50 palaces, a royal record

I'm familiar with various forms of the word suck in American
slang, as in 'suck someone', 'suck up to someone', 'something
sucks', 'someone is a sucker'. I believe the first one is slang
for fellatio. Do the other forms also have vulgar connotations?

What does "unlimited" actually mean?
See, for example, this UK page for a company selling mobile phones and
services.
<URL:http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/payAsYouGoPhones.do>

When I started primary school in Scotland during the early 1970's I
was amongst the last year that was subject to a new spelling method.
It used phonetic characters e.g. æ to represent the spoken sound.
Come the second year I had to unlearn all that I had already leanrt.

How about each of the following? Preferences?
1. Discuss it among (you/yourselves).
2. We wanted him among (us/ourselves).
3. We had an argument between (us/ourselves).

I got to translate this excerpt from a soccer match:
"Lovely controlled passing... a cross that's just begging to be finished,
and finish he did"
I can't understand this passage: "that's just begging to be finished, and