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I would never say "enjoy the rest of your day" (ETROYD) to anyone. If a sales assistant says this to me (it always is a sales assistant; their manager obliges them to do it), I think:
-- how impertinent of you to suppose that the enjoyableness of the rest of my day depends on your wishes
-- h...
I've inherited an old PC from my girlfriend's dad and when setting up the printer I got a bit of a surprise:
Two questions spring to mind here:
Why does Windows think my wireless keyboard is a toaster?
Why does Windows even have an icon for a toaster in the devices menu?
A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth's rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 25 such leap seconds have been inserted. The most recent one happened on June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC.
The UTC time standard, which is widely used for international timekeeping and as the reference for civil time in most countries...
The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is set in a alternate history/future history in which civilizations of human beings on a number of nearby stars, including Terra (Earth), are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, peaceful Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth but were the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain long ago, which was followed by a long period when interstellar travel...
The Curse of Ham is a misnomer for the curse upon Canaan that was imposed by the biblical patriarch Noah.
The relevant narrative occurs in the Book of Genesis and concerns Noah's drunkenness and the accompanying shameful act perpetrated by his son Ham the father of Canaan (Gen. 9:20–27). The controversies raised by this story regarding the nature of Ham's transgression, and the question of why Noah cursed Canaan when Ham had sinned, have been debated for over two thousand years. The story's original objective was to justify the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites, but in later centuries...
The strongest cue for distinguishing these two words is the length of the vowel (in American English at least).
The word can has a lengthened vowel
can't has a much shorter vowel
On the telephone, where the auditory signal is compressed, exaggerating the length of the vowels ("did you say ca-...The 10% of brain myth is the widely perpetuated urban legend that most or all humans only make use of 10% (or some other small percentage) of their brains. It has been misattributed to many people, including Albert Einstein. By association, it is suggested that a person may harness this unused potential and increase intelligence.
Though factors of intelligence can increase with training, the popular notion that large parts of the brain remain unused, and could subsequently be "activated", rests more in popular folklore than scientific theory. Though mysteries regarding brain function remain—e.g...
Peeves versus Rules
There is no such rule of English grammar. There is only a peeve.
It is not wrong to say that he speaks like his father does. There is no grammatical barrier to saying that, and native speakers have always done so.
The like-versus-as shibboleth is of the same class as fict...
Blue ice occurs when snow falls on a glacier, is compressed, and becomes part of a glacier that winds its way toward a body of water. During its travels, air bubbles that are trapped in the ice are squeezed out, and the size of the ice crystals increases, making it clear.
In some areas, earthquakes have raised the blue ice above the ground and created formations much like large frozen waves.
The blue color is sometimes wrongly attributed to Rayleigh scattering. Rather, ice is blue for the same reason water is blue: it is a result of an overtone of an oxygen-hydrogen (O-H) bond stretch in water...
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Transcript for
Aug30
Aug '1431
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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...
