Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2010

In:
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One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,

Hello, Everyone:
In the US, the format to express a date is to put the MONTH in the
first place, then the DATE and finally the YEAR. In Europe, however,
the order of MONTH and DATE are reversed. The two formats can cause

Now, "of" in:
"I catch no more than a ray
To feel of"
could well have been used for necessities of rhythm, but is there a

This dictionary on the net gives a useful data for sounds.
It's very convenient to confirm pronunciation
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lathe
But I sometimes feel unnatural in sounds coming out of it.

Have you heard of Paul Jennings? He was a British humorist, mainly active in
the 50s and 60s. I have one of his books, "Oddly Ad Lib", which was
published in 1965.
This book is mainly of interest for the piece called "Ware, Wye, Watford

Please help solve a debate with a friend.  During the war, was it 4
dollars to a British pound?  Or maybe after the war?

I saw this sentence and found it strange, simply in my own sense,
being an intermediate learner (or just a beginner) of English, which
is not my mother tongue.  Could anyone tell me what does "uttered"
function here? I guess it's a verb, but could it be there without a

Would you say "in" in "in saying naught" is equivalent to "while"
here?
Also, I'm not sure how
"It will be further done"

Does "do" in:
"But ' twas by making sweetbreads do"
mean "make acceptable?"
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Let me ask a question about the phrase from a novel.
"I'm confident we're going to find him and a lot of other a.sholes."
"We?"
"We is collectively speaking," he explains. "We as in us good guys.

This is another line from Louis L'Amour's Tucker - he describes a town
as "wild and wooly" and the above.
Googling, he seems to have borrowed from Owen Wister's The Virginian,
but what does it mean?

While watching the Winter Olympics I noticed that BBC commentators and
experts sometimes put a schwa in the names of two of the events: Ski
Cross and Board Cross.
It turns out that they are "right" and the organisers of the Olympics

A mailing-list discussion about "Steller's jay" (the official name)
versus "Steller Jay" has coincided with our thread about noun
modifiers, just after some comments about "Down's syndrome"  versus
"Down syndrome".

Ladies and Gentlemen:
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My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four
thousand books.

Dear people,
there is that marine song "Anchors aweigh" which I took to be
"Anchors away" in former times. Now - is "aweigh" another
form of "away", or does that word have something to do with weight?