Good evening, Mister Micawber, the pressure of other work has deterred me from replying to this message of yours as promptly as possible, so I intend to do it in the present post in order to shed light on some important questions.

Had better is a solid expression which used to give advice You had better leave now, otherwise we are late on the bus. (If we don't hurry, we will be late). You had better check e-mail or you can miss the job you want. John'd better shut

here in Europe we still say "may" when asking for permission, and correct our children when they use "can/could" as a substitute That's interesting, because the British writer on linguistics, F. R. Palmer, observed as early

think): "Why, hadn't >> expected to see) empty." (said Was it >> ever common in the US? Is it still common in the UK? But what about Prof. Lawler's observation about 'ever so big', 'ever so much', etc?

In our last episode, , the lovely and talented Donna Richoux broadcast on alt.usage.english: True, but this was supposed to be a thread about sense drift, not etymology. Sorry, Mark, can you elaborate? I just cannot grasp what distinction you are

English speakers commonly reverse the order of multiple consonants e.g. ... of the proposition that they ought to be the same. Because it's an agreed code, we should stick to it as far as possible. I have just coined the term

English does have gendered nouns. Ships are always female, for instance. This is not true. In most peoples' speech, and in Standard English, nouns that do not refer to persons do ... 'him', or even a rabbit 'she' - a

You do realize they're talking about weight, not price, right? They're talking about mass. Same thing. But we already have a good word for this weight. We aren't shopping for a new word. There are too many ambiguities in the word

a I'm sure you know what you're talking about, but perhaps you'd care to explain. It's surely stretching it to claim that "multiply" is "the specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar

In an episode of Friends. Chandler: So who's going to tell them? Monica: (quickly) Not it! Chandler: Not it! Damn ... it's implicitly understood that whoever says "Not it!" first gets to get out of doing something unpleasant. Am