In Idioms^x, Word order^x

He sat happily Not He sat happy By the way your word order is highly inverted That s not wrong in itself but you might be interested to know the more usual phrasing He sat happily with a cartoon book for hours And you might also like to know that the term is comic book if I understand what sort...

Hi all I ve been giving English conversation lessons to a theology professor for about a year now He s getting on in the years a couple years from retirement and his primary goal has been just to get his spoken English going a little stronger His mother tongue is French but he s been teaching at...

Hi N2GJust a little added comment The fixed idiom has the word order I gave you If you found your sentence written somewhere with the word order reversed i e sound and safe then the author was probably just playing with the idiom possibly because banks have safes vaults where money is kept

Hi KooyeenI d agree that the word order in He asked what was the matter has more to do with idiom than anything else The verb be doesn t always follow the usual word order that you find in other indirect or reported questions I would say that this depends somewhat on how far away from the subject...

Hi ForbesThank you for your long reply I do appreciate it I would just like to say that I my opinion is based on the knowledge I have of the Germanic and Romance languages and it is of course very subjective I fully understand that not everyone agrees with me and what I consider easy may be...

The idiom under a cloud means that you are feeling miserable depressed fed up gloomy So I don t think it really goes with chasing someone See if you can think of a more appropriate example and post it here again and we ll help you sort out your word order