When we were doing vocabulary drills in 7th grade, it fell to my lot to define subservient. I said obsequious. The teacher had to look it up. True story.
Study my works. Notice, for example, that "Hey, give him a break. That is proper Anglo-Saxon pronunciation of seal" employs the use of the -ea- combination of break*in a way that rhymes with *sale.
A lighter touch is best. That way smart people think you're funny and stupid people don't get offended.
Meh, I fucked up the italicization in my statement. And it's too late to edit it.
Study my works. Notice, for example, that "Hey, give him a break. That is proper Anglo-Saxon pronunciation of seal" employs the use of the -ea- combination of break in a way that rhymes with sale.
But, yeah, it's a big disappointment when you realize your teachers are basically not very bright.
I seem to remember (back in the day) being taught sentences must have an object and an action and that the shortest possible was something like "do it.".
Can someone please formalise this and explain whether simply "no." is valid?
Isn't it a bummer when you answer a question for someone, then they tell you that they actually meant something completely different! Seems to happen to me a lot.
It sounds like you want to create your own site, where expert proofreading is available for free. Then you can moderate something useful, instead of moderating ELU.
No, it's a question of what the word "sentence" means. It therefore constitutes general reference - any dictionary should have an answer, even if they don't all agree.
If a language doesn't have words (for example, it consists only of pictures, or is only a spoken language like Cantonese), does it still have sentences?
Au contraire mon frere. If we can sort out a consistent definition of "sentence", then we have some portion of a platform from which we can debate linguistics.
When we study linguistics, we use terms like "phoneme" and "grapheme" and "word" and "sentence" and "idiolect". If we don't know what these words mean, then there's nothing to study.
See. That's what the Germans would call an Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme.
My point is precisely that linguists who study Russian will study it whether or not you agree with their definition of sentence, or cucumber for that matter.
Well, it's easier to ignore the fact that the world will end one day, than it is to ignore the fact that one day, Reg Dwight will die. Therefore, if Reg Dwight had children, some part of him would appear to be immortal. Therefore, the pursuits of his life would cease to be pointless.
Or to put it another way, the universe is pointless until you sprog.
I don't assume that immortality has a point. I assume that the universe has a point to immortal beings. Feel free to argue that as there's no such thing as an immortal being, the universe is till pointless and I haven't proven anything.
You can edit it. Or let it be, because a couple years down the line every definition on Wiktionary will be wrong.
@DavidWallace That again is just a matter of definition. I can define the point of the universe to be immortality. I can also define it as playing with LEGO. Ultimately, the universe itself doesn't care.
@RegDwightѬſ道 maybe this is because we look at what we consider the past and how it creates the future, but really what we consider the past is the future and the future is the past and what we do is create the future, so we won't understand the point of the universe until we're at the beginning
@Gigili "The Head of combating criminal crimes" sounds like a job title, and makes sense. However I'd drop criminal, because crimes are by their nature criminal. Then I'd change it to crime because it is more usual to use the mass noun version of crime in job titles.
of course, if you want to use the job title in a humorous context, then keep criminal, as the exaggeration is comical.
I'm always confused how to write a "something of something else" in English, especially when plural is involved. For example, what would be the correct way to write the following sentences in English:
There are three phones, each phone is of a different type:
Three types of phones?
Three phone...
my last boss was not a good boss, I assume he is a good person, but when it came to being a boss he couldn't get the level right. between 0 and micromanaging every flipping detail he could only be at extremes
They want to micromanage everything, and when I tell them that this is a team effort and they can't control everything, then they stop wanting to help altogether. Not my boss, but peers.
The answer is best approximated as "yes", although there are some strictly non-context free components of English. The approximation of saying "English grammar is context free" is more true than false, in that the vast majority of the sentences you will encounter will be parsable by a simple EBNF...
Jesus holy Christ.
There he has posted the grammar for all of English.
I run into the following sitatution:
If he had bothered Mike, he would have bothered him back so much that he would have forgotten about bothering anyone in his life again.
Is 'would have' the correct format for the part in bold? Can we use other tenses in the same context?
Iam doing a research about the difference in meaning between covered by, covered in, and covered with:
for example: what is the difference between:
covered with blood
covered in blood
the mountain was covered in snow or
Future tense is certainly used to express events that are going to happen, but you can say "The next century begins in 2101". Notice that this is only because you are treating it as a measurable quantity; you could, in theory, say ?This century begins in 2001 and ends in 2100, though it sounds o...
This answer is simply wrong. "Measurable quantity" has nothing to do with it.
@Reg: 129600 are pumping. Are we afraid? By that I mean, is it worth WBing?