Discussion Groups / British English / February 2004

Hi I'm italian
what's the correct word position for the idiom "blood sweat and tears"?
(I mean...Is correct "blood sweat and tears" or "sweat tears and blood" or
"tears sweat and blood" or "etc..."....?

I always wonder what the appropriate way of addressing people in emails
is. Being German, I'm not feeling very comfortable in addressing other
people by their first name if I don't know them personally. Especially
with persons more senior than myself I prefer to err on the wrong ...

I have found two sentences in "Sense and Sensibility" in which the choice of
the tense is not quite clear to me:
1) "Upon my word, I am not acquainted with the minutia of her principles. I
only know that *I never yet heard* her admit any instance of a second

As I'm applying for an university I was to hand in a recommendation of a
prof. Now I was to write the concept but I'm not sure whether it is good.
Is there anyone willing to have a look at this short letter?
Maybe you have something German to correct...

To my consternation, my comprehension of the concepts listed in
the subject line has been questioned, and I consequently crave
corroboration from the cognoscenti. Please consider the
following content and confirm or confute my convictions.

I have noticed an ever increasing incidence of "between X *or* Y ... "
in, of all media, the BBC!!
And the standard of reading generally by so-called "correspondents" on
the BEEB is slipping alarmingly, with ill-timed pauses, or the absence

I'm fighting a losing battle with my six-year old son with "have" used
as an auxilliary. He will say, for example, "I must of lost it." I
correct him, and he remembers until he goes back to school - it must be
in common usage in the playground. I'm assuming that as soon as his

What is the difference between to and too??
If anyone can explain i would be most gratefull.
James Northampton

I'm reading "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen and, though I have read
only some fifty pages so far, I have already found a possible peculiarity in
Jane Austen's language, concerning her usage of should and would.
She happens to use "should" for such set phrases as "I should

On a webpage at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/VolunteerSiteGuides-Code> is
this homily (between my pair of double angle-quotemarks):
«
It is good practise to spell check messages in a writing application such as

There has been some discussion in the TLS recently regarding the punctuation
of Earls Court.  The area and the exhibition hall do not have an apostrophe,
whereas the Earl's Court Road and Earl's Court underground station do.
Comments, anyone?

That's a joke for the Americans, of course, who haven't heard of a
philosopher.  The Canadians manage all right with "Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone" - except that it's "Harry Potter à l'Ecole des
Sorciers" in French!  But I digress. Despite the Latin translation being

Recent talk in the news about spam has estimates that about
half of all e-mail is spam these days.  I doubt it.  In the
e-mail deluge that batters my inbox I would guess that about
one message in ten thousand is non-spam.

I wonder when the BBC first published, either in broadcast or in writing,
the phrases "report into" and "study into".

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