It makes me contented to realise that you have made sense of the striking difference between not... but vs and , so this 'one thing' you are referring to is the last on the agenda, and may I be clear about two points. First, the omission

Every Girl Scout met their/her own fundraising goal. Or All the Girls Scouts met her own funraising goal. One tragic effect of Hurricane Katrina was/were massive flooding Politics are/were/is my least favorite conversation Correct Subject

I've been told by British friends that "different to" is basically the British equivalent of the American "different than": Neither is approved of by hardcore prescriptivists, but everybody uses them anyway. The American

Could you tell me if the following sentence sounds idiomatic from a native speaker's viewpoint? "I need to slam-dunk her a quick one" It may well get a laugh from Al Bundy in the context of a TV sitcom, but I think it would be

Do/does/did is not used in questions 1. with forms of to be : Is he happy? Were they swimming? 2. with perfect and past perfect auxiliaries : Have you seen him? Had it already begun? 3. sometimes with have/has/had when the verb is in the

I can't seem to relate the verb usage to the noun usage. Somebody educate me. What part of the shot are we evoking? I can't make it work. I don't think it measures up to U/D's standards. Are we talking about a rape here? The player

Slang moves much faster than I do! There are probably more than a million people contributing to Urban Dictionary. Some contributions are accepted , some rejected . I suppose "slam-dunk" is itself a slang term, but the usage you propose

1 The team redecortated <redecorated> the set to look like a hospital room/so that it would look like a hospital room. They weren't really shoot <shooting> in an hospital. <Either corrected version is fine.> (is the word

Prescriptively speaking, "is" would be safer to use for formal English. However, when "neither" is followed by "of + plural noun", using a plural verb is extremely common -- particularly in everyday informal English.

Both is not needed. "Kate's parents aren't home" is perfectly clear as is. Both assumes two and parents assumes two. Yes, you could also say "Neither of Kate's parents is home." (Do not use neither with not -- this