Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2010

Several items:
1. Any difference in meaning between
"how glad I was
To have you come"

Good catch.

Several items:
1. What is the meaning of "brought you up"
in
"brought you up to think?"

Several items:
1. "Market things." Could they mean the things to be _sold_ at the
market?
2. Does

In yesterday's paper, there was a story wherein "put the pedal to the
medal" was used. My first response was to wonder if the newspaper's
proofreader (or copy editor) had been laid off (or terminated) in these
hard times. But then I thought: Is the "medal" version a common

I received an invitation to what is promised to be an "extraordinarily
singular event."
Isn't "singular" enough?

The BBC will have a documentary on the refound HMS Duke of Wellington as
he/she lies on the Thames riverbed.
Is a ship always a she,
or may she become a he,

I just came across a You Tube Video with a football song
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5m3EJwoixw)
where the chorus runs like this:
"you'll hear those mighty lion's roar,

In Enter the Saint (The Policeman with Wings) by Leslie Charteris,
there is this sentence about Simon Templar...
'He played tennis with vigour and shameless inefficiency, erratically
scrambling through weeks of rabbitry to occasional flashes of a

Folks, I need more help with my screenplay.
This time, I'm dealing with dialogue:
"Every woman wants to find a man whom she
can trust completely."

I understand that the type of fixing used in building to allow screws to be
fitted in walls is called a Rawlplug in British English. Is this used in
American English too? Or rather, is it the usual term? If not, do Americans
say wall plug or what do they normally call that device?

http://www.lightstriking.com/test/19.wav
Accoring to scripts, it says: keep the towns safe
But what comes my eays is "keep new my towns safe".
I couldn't catch "the" firmly.

The referent of "his" in
"his long scythe"
can't be neither the dawn nor the "butterfly," but most probably the
early man who had mowed the grass, but I couldn't find any grammatical

Is "gone"
in:
"These things the mind has pondered on
A moment and still asking gone"

It is stretching it a bit to consider this an issue of English usage,
but I think it's an issue that language-enthusiasts may be a bit more
"tuned into" than most.
My own feeling is that conversation is (to an extent) an art form, and