What do you mean by 'idiomatic'? Are you saying that "Wow! She's too beautiful!" means 'not really beautiful'? I know for a fact that too means also 'very' in a formal register, for example: "Thank you,

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

As far as my own usage is concerned, I prefer ... comedies," and certain fixed forms such as "for goodness' sake." In my experience, "for goodness' sake" is usually pronounced "for goodness sakes". Yet

William R Ward wrote on 11 Jan 2005: "ELF (English as a Lingua-Franca) is against promoting a single English that all learners in the whole world should model." Don't you think the term "lingua franca" applied to English is

There does seem to be confusion with 'idiomatic'. It's just another word, like most other English words, that has more than one meaning. I'm tolerant of people's using "idiomatic" with any of its meanings, so long as

Raymond S. Wise wrote on 29 Nov 2004: This doesn't qualify as a solecism any more than "can't" or "won't" could be considered solecisms. Of course it does. To those of us who recognize that there are such things as

Thanks for these examples, Donna. I had always been uneasy aboutthis usage never seriously trying to eliminate it from ... is an idiom and English cannot be expected to be as rigidly logical as some grammarians would like. I have always shared

It's a sign of being a functional illiterate. It's like ... your affected speech be the tilted tune. That's the key. I'm not sure how many levels of sarcasm you have in that. Anyway, here are some famous "functional

But do you realize that there's a widely-used variant of "another thing coming", "something else coming"? Can't remember if we ever looked for early cites for the idiom "(have) something else coming".

In addition to my other answer to your post, I'd like to say that Idon't much care for a sentence ... towhich of those is it that he does not like. "I don't like apples andoranges" is better, but not foolproof. But that's