By Idioms, Clauses

Although you do not brag with tall tales, you are actually more competent than adulterer."Brag with" does sound weird, as does the usage of "tall tales", which are similar to myths. The comparison of a good lover to an adulterer is rather coarse and definitely not a compliment. Also,...

Hi, HSS It's only a hunch but 'Pass for fair' didn't seem as an idiom to me. But I'm sure Fair could only be an adjective since it modifies the noun 'visage'. As a relative clause, 'which age turned more knowing and severe' can not suggest a question. It is acting as an adjective in the...

chemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />> Your essay is clear in general. Yet you have to be careful about some points.>> First, try to paraphrase what you want to say if it's given by the topic. Don't use the exact wordings.>> It's good for you to have used different sentence structures in the...

(Mr M forgot to log in again!-- MM) It is a matter of natural sentence flow and stress for meaning. Let's write it like a prose sentence: I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. Spoken in conversation, sentences carry several levels of stress, not just stressed and...

I hear it as simple inversion, which I think is a peculiarity of the word "case", not "as". Therefore, I don't think anything has been left out. If anything, it's the "so" that's omitted (when the "as" clause precedes). As was with the worst ... Alternately, as is/was the case with...

My friend is embarrassed and the baby is due in August. Is this by any chance a translation from French? It's been a long time since I studied French, but I recall being told never to translate "I am embarrassed" as "Je suis embarassee," because in French it is an idiom meaning "I am pregnant."...

Hi, I have thought that you can use only "adjective" in "as ....as". => as + adjective + as e.g. "He is as old as his wife" "He is twice as young as you" But I've realised recently that you can also use "adverb" even though I have been using clauses like "as soon as possible" or "finish it...

Mr Pedantic is under the mistaken impression that these "conditional types" are frozen formulas On the contrary, as I commented before: ' may sound differently to other members'. That said, I would indeed find it a strange 'collocation'. Many strangenesses are 'common': if you've ever read any...

Hello Jack In addition to what you already have from Abbie, here's some stuff from another thread, which may help with the general background to AS IF statements. I’ve set out 'as if' in the style of conditional structures, for convenience. AS IF structures are perhaps more easily understood...

Well, I can't find where I or someone else said that, XM-- the thread is more concerned with the 'could/could have' forms-- but yes, 'to not care less' seems like a root of the idiomatic phrase 'couldn't care/couldn't have cared less'. And 'to have not cared less' would be the perfect...