Khoff wrote: This is not particularly Southern, and I wouldn't call it an idiom. According to my dictionary, it's an intransitive meaning of "use," used only in the past and only with an infinitive, to mean "to be accustomed to." It expresses a

I wanted to include all of Europe since there are more English-speaking countries outside of Great Britain.

Ughh. Why does meter always mess up everything? Hahaha.

I think being surrounded by rednecks, who can hardly write, much less speak proper English, doesn't help at all. The reason I keep asking this is I ran into a song titled "Thundering and Lightninging." I know song writers are hardly English

I've noticed, mostly from British television programs, some discrepancies between the two "versions" of the English language. American English speakers consider groups of people to be a singular noun. IE, in America, you would say, "The

Nona The Brit wrote: 'I have got' is only used in British English. That's not necessarily true. As a matter of fact, I overuse "I have got..." "I have gotten..." is more common here though.

I searched "lightning" on the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary ( http://www.m-w.com/ ), and I found an inflected form of the intransitive verb form of lightning, which was "lightninged." So, my question is, if you can add the -ed ending to it,

There really is no difference. The only reason to differentiate between the two (that I can see) would be to avoid errors in parrallelism.

I've been trying to figure out the correct way to use lightning in verb form. If I were to say, "It is thundering and lightninging outside," would that be correct? Edit: I'm amazed that I don't know simple things like this, and English is my first

If you've ever visited the South (and I mean the United States.), you've more than likely heard the phrase "used to," meaning at a previous time. I'm wondering if there's any alternative to this saying. An example would be, "I used to be good at