Hot answers tagged nouns
5
Simpleness does not necessarily mean the same as simplicity.
For example, simple time in music is a time signature (basic rhythm) which is not compound time. Simple time has simpleness, not simplicity.
OED has a number of similar definitions:
simpleness noun
Absence of pride, ostentation, or pretentiousness; plain or unassuming disposition or ...
3
From an American point of view, none of the terms biscuit, cake, or cookie is an appropriate descriptor for ships biscuit, which is also known as hardtack and by other terms. The image below is from wikipedia's article about hardtack.
The article says
Hardtack (or hard tack) is a simple type of cracker or biscuit, made from flour, water, and ...
3
See this Etymonline entry that distinguishes these two words. It says that concision is a more recent "literary critic's word" & conciseness is probably more familiar to the average Anglophone. Use the one that better suits your audience. In an academic paper, use concision; in more informal prose, use conciseness. Or else be consistent & always use ...
3
Swag as a dictionary entry traditionally has several meanings, including the one you're referencing.
Swag as a slang word has its roots in "swagger".
Swagger: A very confident and typically arrogant or aggressive gait or
manner
It refers to a way your present yourself; having style, confidence, etc. Using the term is so popular among young people ...
2
All three are grammatical and idiomatic. A chance can be all of these things, and more. The top 50 collocations from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) look as follows:
COCA BNC
1 a good chance 1403 a good chance 274
2 a better ...
2
The juke in jukebox comes from jook joint, a slang term for a roadhouse or brothel.
The Online Etymology Dictionary describes jook as having originated from a Gullah word meaning wicked and disorderly:
jook joint "roadhouse" (1935), Black English slang, from juke, joog "wicked, disorderly," in Gullah (the creolized English of the coastlands of South ...
2
I think wordlength (as a single word, or two words separated by a hyphen or a space) is a bit "geeky" these days. Non-specialists invariably refer to 32- or 64-bit systems, and programmers usually refer to 4- or 8-byte [native] integer size where the distinction is relevant. But if they were happy with the term itself, I doubt anyone would quibble over which ...
2
British biscuit is what Americans call cookie; US biscuit is close to what British speakers call scone. Ship's biscuit is about the only modern use of biscuit which preserves its original sense of "twice cooked" (Latin biscoctus French bis cuit—but the French spelling is a late-18th-century affectation; the word had been thoroughly naturalized as bisket, ...
2
What makes an item of food is a biscuit or a cake is something that the UK government contested in court as part of the Jaffa Cake trial. The Tribunal came to the following conclusion:
The product’s name was a minor consideration.
Ingredients:Cake can be made of widely differing ingredients, but Jaffa cakes were made of an egg, flour, and sugar mixture ...
1
Touch/Feel the surface of an object. The sense of touch requires something physical and solid unlike smell and hearing and it is not interchangeable with feel which can also express a state of being as in "He feels lonely/hot/tired etc..." You cannot help but feel thirsty, hungry etc...
Touch is a deliberate action; feel can be both a voluntary and ...
1
Here in the deep South (U.S.) it was always "coke" for all soft drinks. This may seem odd, but it's much like saying "Kleenex" for a tissue or "Xerox" to mean copy. But I rarely use the term generically any more nor do I hear it used that way much. I also do not hear the alternatives "soda" and certainly not "pop".
So how do we refer to them? Truth be ...
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