Being Swedish but living in Kenya for many years I initially reacted when at the local market I was offered a paper bag (verbally) but given a plastic bag (physically). This is always the case and was not a single incident. I thought paper bag had become a common word for all kinds of bags in...

i think paper bad would generally imply a bag made of paper. But the answer could be different based on geography

The answer is No. But people ignore being accurate, especially around the world.

I’ve read this expression in a news article related to a Hawaiian politician: “He is well-regarded in both Washington and in the islands for his gracious manner and spirit of aloha.” I understand that aloha is a Hawaiian greeting and, as such, I understand the expression in the quote above as “h...

The first question is: why do you want to do that? It's a bad idea to use tables for page formatting, but if what you want is a table, you should use a table.

You should teach them to use CSS for layout and tables for tabular data. They will figure out that they can (mis)use tables for layout all by themselves.

A certain pedant is claiming that beginning a sentence with "That being said" is grammatically incorrect owing to the apparent logical contradiction in claiming that something in the past (e.g. the previous paragraph) is still "being said", i.e. unfolding in the present. He claims that only "that...