Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2010

DALLAS (Reuters) - The first national Tea Party convention meets this
week to take aim at all the raucous movement says is wrong with
Washington and Sarah Palin, darling of America's conservatives, will
help lead the charge.

1. The city has changed, and it doesn't resemble that of 20 years
ago.
2. The city has changed, and it doesn't resemble the one of 20 years
ago.

I imagine "'ll" is a contraction for "until/till," right?
Informal speech, I guess.
----
"And wait'll he finds the lipstick!"

Dear Everyone:
We have the words "left-handed", "right-handed" and "ambidextrous". Is
there a word for "one-handed" that has the same word-formation as
"ambidextrous"? Is "monodextrous" the word?

Watching a B&W episode of Peter Gunn, from the late 50's or early
60's.
He needs to put a note in a pin-ball parlor machine with a question.
The question is, "Whom do I see about getting a building burned down?"

1. The sentence feels too reduced, as though it need include 'and'.
2. The sentence feels too reduced, as though it needs 'and' included.
3. The sentence feels too reduced, as though it needs to include
'and'.

There is an interesting post and discussion entitled "(H)eureka" at
LanguageHat (http://www.languagehat.com/) that bears on a discussion we
were having recently. The following words in particular caught my eye:
"Ancient Greek words in English came via scholars with no interest in ...

'Everytime he comes near I want to wretch'

I don't trust you any farther than I can throw you.
I used to hear that phrase a lot in the 50's.  I used to use it a lot,
maybe the 60's.  I liked it. It seemed like a better comparison than
the similar phrase people used (which I forget right now.)

It's always sad to read of the death of a relatively young person. Even
allowing for the punctuation, I thought the BBC website was a bit
insensitive to describe her as 'the Clueless actress'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8499218.stm

As most of you will know, moves in a chess game are sometimes
annotated with ?s and !s and many other signs. ? means a bad move
and ! is a good move.
This used to lead to some confusion, for example, "I suddenly had a

Do you think it's time to retire certain Latin abbreviations and
phrases?
If we use "e.g." at least a few of our readers might not know what it
means.

I misspelled "imminent" as "immnent" and the Microsoft Word spell
checker suggested "imminent" or "immanent". I have to admit I was
surprised and went to the OED to find:
Immanent : Indwelling, inherent; actually present or abiding in;

"Do you mind if I take this seat?"
Two opposite answers that means the same thing:
1. "Sure, you may take it"
2. "Not at all".

I haven't noticed this being mentioned before - The Book Depository has
11,000 PDFs of printed books for free download:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/free