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Jun 24	comment	Is “driving the reins” used as a deliberately erroneous phrase? Geez, Louise, another slip. "Know" for "no". Dementia isn't as much fun as they said it would be in the brochure. I wouldn't mind if I couldn't notice it...
Jun 24	comment	Is “driving the reins” used as a deliberately erroneous phrase? @Martha - you disapprove of paronomasiacs? We really can't help it, you know, and there are know known drugs that don't make our condition worse. We especially transcend dental medication.
Jun 23	comment	Speaking with a forked tongue Much of that Hollywood Injun talk is actually derived from a real North American aboriginal English pidgin that extended back to the first English colonial settlements here, and except for the fact that the Hollywood version seems to have gained gender differentiation in personal pronouns (there were no "she" or "her" in the real pidgin), it's pretty faithful to the existing recorded examples. That's not entirely surprising, since mass (forced) acculturation didn't begin until the end of the nineteenth century, so elements of the pidgin were still on the ground when talkies came around.
Jun 23	comment	“practitioners' community” or “practitioners community” Your reasoning is identical to mine, it's merely phrased differently.
Mar 9	comment	What is the distinction between “role” and “rôle” [with a circumflex]? @Billare: There is no good reason to use rôle anymore. My comment in the previous thread sums it up: the rôle of rôle is now being played by role. The plain English spelling has entirely supplanted the old spelling in modern usage; I wouldn't be at all surprised if more than ninety percent of the occurrences of rôle in the past fifty years were in discussions of whether to use rôle or role when writing.
Mar 8	comment	Is “whatsoever” a formal word in written English? Well, it's not white tie formal, but it can get by in a morning coat or a tuxedo...
Mar 8	comment	What is the distinction between “role” and “rôle” [with a circumflex]? The other three definitions are extensions of the original meaning (a character of part played by a performer). Once a word has been sufficiently well-adopted to undergo semantic broadening, it's probably time to stop using funny foreign squiggles to write it. (The circumflex, by the way, indicates that one or more letters had been given the old heave-ho in the original French. It had been rolle -- literally, the roll of paper or parchment upon which the part had been written.)
Mar 5	comment	Inversion in English Also archaic, I'm afraid. (Even that meaning of the word so only holds in certain specific phrases.) Old forms hold on in frequently-used words and phrases even as the world changes around them. There are a few individual idiomatic phrases you just have to know -- like so do I and how to pluralize ox. There is no general rule of grammar to apply.
Mar 5	comment	Inversion in English Yes -- it's a quotation from Shakespeare's Macbeth (Act IV, Scene I).
Mar 5	comment	What does “8/7c” stand for? The scheduling habit is a holdover from the radio days, believe it or not. The old major AM networks only needed a small handful of transmission sites, some emitting as much as a quarter of a million watts, to cover all of the Eastern and Central time zone in the US (and really tear a hole in Canadian reception while they were at it, by the way). Although over-the-air television is much shorter range (so the common schedule wasn't necessary anymore), you try telling the people in Chicago that they're getting the "latest" news an hour later than New York from this day forward.
Mar 4	comment	Why do many forms ask for initials instead of full names? It gets particularly difficult with compound names. A person with a Dutch sensibility might not "see" the v in a van or vander/van der as an initial, while an American with the same name likely would. The same would apply for de, al and so on (not to mention the O's, Mcs and Macs of this world).
Mar 4	comment	Isn't the word “uninstall” wrong? "Install" is a verb -- all of your counterexamples are adjectives. You can no more "uninsane" people than you could have "insaned" them in the first place.
Mar 4	comment	Singular form for “headphones”? Why does it need to be current? Radios came with earphones when I was a kid (or you could buy earphones at places like Radio Shack). Some of them went in the ear, some were rather like supra-aural or circumaural headphones with one side abbreviated, others were a sort of cup that went over the pinna, but all were earphones.
Mar 4	comment	Was the “Ye Olde Shoppe” ever used or is it just an ancient-looking construct of modern times? Whether the use of the y is a deliberate concession to convenience by printers or a simple misreading by people unaccustomed to the thorn, it's still a corruption of the original form.
Mar 3	comment	Connotation of “maze” and “get maze”? Yes -- it should be "get mazed" if you're going to use it at all. Using it at all, though, is probably not a good idea -- it would be like using stonied instead of astonished. It works perfectly if you want to write in the style of Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, but a vanishingly small number of modern readers would be able to derive any meaning from it.
Mar 3	comment	Pronunciation of 'cos' (as in the mathematical term) Thanks -- I just noticed I missed pasting in the upside-down omega dealie (obviously, I have all of these glyphs on tap, but I can't get at them directly on this <expressive glyphs missing> machine -- it was configured for Chinese and Hebrew originally, and I haven't been able to exorcise all of the weirdness yet).
Mar 3	comment	Store names & possessive Actually, J. C. Penney Company, Inc., did once call itself J. C. Penney's, then simply Penney's (although the apostrophe didn't appear in the company logo).
Mar 3	comment	How is vehicle fuel efficiency expressed outside the United States? The "abbreviation" is the ordinary scientific expression of the term: <quantity>l/100km. Once you slip into the metric world, you tend to get away from purely alphabetic abbreviations. In the US, you might drive at "60 mph"; in Canada, you would drive at "100 km/h" (but you'd pronounce it "clicks").
Mar 2	comment	Possessive of Queen's? It would have been so much easier if you'd gone the engineering route -- "I've been dyed purple" is quite a bit less grammatically complicated.
Mar 2	comment	What is the correct usage of “whom”? The grammarian in me agrees completely with the second paragraph; the linguist in me, however, believes it's time for us to admit that whom is rather quaint and precious these days and let it pass quietly into history.