I've never heard hold down the f ort in British English. I think we only say hold the fort .

I suspect that the case where portion is used with a plural form is when what follows has a very strong plural force - a portion of the many different liquids which went into those containers. But even then the singularity of a portion overrides

No, Osee. I'm afraid not. Fiscal means to do with taxes. In the UK the fiscal year runs from April 6th to April 5th, to put it at its simplest. That means that you are taxed on receipts and can offset payments during that period, and have to

Yes, I think that puts it very well, Liveinjapan. We could also say, more correctly perhaps, Life wouldn't be so noisy or so dangerous. Incidentally, in your sentence, I'm not happy that the it manages to refer back to life. I think the it

You can put the question like that, certainly, Tuongvan, or you can leave out the at , and say Is it raining your end? The remark would be most usual if you are on opposite ends of something; if you were on the telephone, for instance. I'm not

I'd hate to say that anything is compulsory in punctuation, but my answer to your question would be that a comma is nearly always worth considering, and often a good idea in those circumstances. If the sentence was very short, the comma would

You haven't told us much about the relationship between these two, but Kara clearly finds Clark's efforts to explain something very irritating. Patronizing means talking down to someone, treating them as an intellectual or social inferior.

Hi Thomas, This subject continues to be a mixed bag. What is a poor student to do? People have strong feelings one way and the other, but nobody wants to call anything incorrect. I take "I'd prefer" and "I'd rather" as

In British English we can say: I prefer you to come by yourself would be fine, to make a general point about your present preferences - I prefer you to come would be odd. Most people would say, talking of the future, I'd prefer you to come or

One very obvious point is that the Browning suggests spoken comments to a disinterested listener, while the Marvell is more like a letter to a girl he's trying to seduce: it doesn't use the conversational tricks which are common in the