Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

Please tell me whether you find the following sentence ambiguous:
"That's for you to decide whether you are a suitable candidate."
Are both of these meanings valid?
a) The decision is entirely yours.

I finally managed to catch up on some reading over the weekend and
found this: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=memory-for-grammar#comments
I've chosen the link with the 2 comments.
If it is true that procedural memory, rather than declarative memory

Is "lovejoy" equivalent to "lover boy?"
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Music Is International
(Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Columbia, 1947)

What is an ex-library book? What does it mean?
http://for.theloveofbooks.com/2009/04/how-to-clean-and-repair-ex-library-books/

"Can Language Skills Ward Off Alzheimer's?"  From the article of that
title in _Time_ magazine, very possibly so:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909420,00.html?xid=rss-
health

What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo  and  In hoc
signo vinces  ?

What the the expression "to quantify the burden" mean in the following
sentence:
"Since expert opinion has deemed the current treatment of X withY as
suboptimal, the goal of this study is to quantify the burden of X by

How do you call this gesture?
You're saying a word and providing
quotes-unquotes signs with the raised fingers of both hands
as "surrounding" it.

I'm in search of some special kind of English dictionary.
This dictionary has to include different forms (or "relatives") of a
word. For instance, for a "noun", it must include "adjectives",
"verbs", and so on related to that "noun". Here's an example: Consider

In the chapter "Schamir" of _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_,
Baring-Gould writes:
  The ancient Aryan had the same name for cloud and mountain.  To him
  the piles of vapour on the horizon were so like Alpine ranges, that

When talking of a couple, may their conflicts/fights be called
"boilovers" or "blowups?" Any similar, or better terms?
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Thanks.

What do you call those alteration?
1. make the garment smaller (take it in?)
2. Make the garment larger (let it out?)

The young woman who wrote the paragraph below believes that she will
be accepted into a Catholic high school.  If so, standards have been
dumbed-down even more than I believed.  Or perhaps affirmative action
has run amok.

"The fixed person for the fixed duties, who in older societies was
such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.  In the second
place, the modern professionalism in knowledge works in the opposite
direction so far as the intellectual sphere is concerned.  The modern

Did you notice that Obama used "hoist" when he meant "foist"?
"Democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion -- those are
not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries, but
rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace ...