Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2010

1. "Cut off at both ends"
has about the same frequency at Google Books as
"Cut off at both ends"
Any differences?

"[By] staying": does Frost mean, at least here, that love is
perpetual, once started?
How about using the singular "beauty" especially coupled with the
pluralizing "several?"

"The dear"
is it an euphemism for
"The devil?"
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From a student's email to me today,
"I haven't finished my literature review seen as I to hand in two
assignments last week"
"Seen" for "Seeing" is a new one, to me.

Is "last" here the adverb, meaning "at last?"
Or is it the noun (which meaning, then)?
---
Desert Places

Something strange is happening:  For quite some time now, I'm not
finding any crossposts from AUE in the AEU download.  I'm wondering if
my newsreader has somehow changed to omit crossposts from a group that
has previously been downloaded.  I'm crossposting this as a test to

I am very confused about the usage of "SUCCESS and CHANCE" in the
following sentences. Could you please tell me if I should use a single
or plural noun?
" I hope to become a part of the ANZ Bank culture, and have CHANCE to

Hello!  I would like to know the differences between each of the three
sentences.
a) The novel took the writer two years to write.
b) The writer took two years to write the nove.

In 'Enter the Saint' by Leslie Charteris, there is a story called 'The
Policeman with Wings' with the sentence...
"''They might have tidied up after',
remarked the Saint mildly, standing at gaze before the disorder."

(1) Mr. XYZ is the client whom I took out to lunch yesterday.
(2) Mr. XYZ is a client whom I took out to lunch yesterday.
(3) I took Mr. XYZ, who is a client, to lunch yesterday.

Wikipedia notes the first documented usage in "Wayne's World" (1992).
However, the first time I heard it was around 1978.  I was working new
construction (pouring the floors) on a Northwestern Bell building
between Center Street and Keosauqua Way in Des Moines Iowa and one of

"To give us a piece of their bills"
does it mean
"to sing for us?"
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My reading of the last two lines takes into account the "I dream upon"
theme:
"[I dream] on the memory of one absent most,
For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye."

I wonder about the meaning brought about by "still" here.
Do the first two verses mean:
"My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree [and from then
on/thenceforward/farther] toward heaven?"

Now, does
"like an old-stone savage armed"
mean
"armed like an old-stone savage"