Sorry if this disappoints you, but we British have now abandoned the 'million million' billion. We now use the American billion (one thousand million) and American trillion (one million million). In British English, a billion used to be equivalent to a million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,0...

Tonight I watched a movie (The Gospel of John) in which Jesus said (as quoted from the written Gospel of John), "It is I." How does this expression differ from "It is me?"

I was taught at school that following expression is invalid in the sense of grammar: Who is there? It's me. The correct one is: Who is there? It's I. Can you let me know which one is accurate? Here is a good explanation about both forms.

"It is ME" is not grammatically correct in the academic sense, but is used in spoken English. "It is I" is grammatically correct in the pure sense, but would never be used in spoken English - or very rarely by people who speak in an ultra-formal dialect. "It is I" would have been correct in ...

If a pronoun is the subject of a verb, then you use I. Otherwise you use me. Exceptions: If it is the object of a linking verb (such as be), traditional grammar says to use I but this is very formal and use of me is extremely widespread in all but the most formal contexts. Myself is used as th...

Ok not sure if this question is on topic (maybe it just needs to be rephrased) but since this made global headlines due to the Dalai Lama not being able to understand it, I figure most non-native speakers would have trouble getting the joke too. This is the joke on YouTube. The Dalai Lama wa...

When there is a possibility one is refereeing to plural or a singular and makes so apparent using (s) like: The computer(s) are on. Should 'are' or 'is' be used?

This is a type of ambiguous headline known as a crash blossom. From the Wikipedia link: Newspaper headlines are written in a telegraphic style (headlinese) which often omits the copula and therefore lends itself to syntactic ambiguity, usually of the garden path type. The name 'crash blossoms...

Although such variation could be the result of things like when the word was borrowed into the language, this variation is probably due to the prosodic structure of the words; we get different vowel sounds because of the way that stress influences vowel quality in English. In English, unstressed...