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A quick Internet search suggests that pied-piping in relative clauses was a natural feature of English even though it is loved by prescriptivists; it existed in older stages of the language, and it ...

A while ago in January The Black Hebrew Israelites were speaking/shouting/proselytizing to surrounding people at Lincoln Memorial. The speaker claimed that the word "Indian" means "savage". A member ...

This ques­tion is specif­i­cally for those who are fa­mil­iar with the 2002 edi­tion of The Cam­bridge Gram­mar of the English Lan­guage by Hud­dle­ston and Pul­lum. The book has this pas­sage at ...

I remember reading a story somewhere that a Southerner wrote about one of his life experiences. He mentioned that in the region he lived there was a time of day that cooled off a large amount in less ...

A lot of work I've been doing recently has been around the emergence of various gender identities. "Neutrois" recently came to my attention, with more information about it here: https://nonbinary....

What is the idiom or phrase to describe someone fishing around by asking the same question to different people until they get the answer they want? Like when someone asks a sales person if there are ...

Is there a subtle difference between these fragments: Jack walked over to the car, opened the door, and started to look for the aspirin vial in the glove compartment. Jill looked on skeptically. ...

In the book which I use to prepare for the IELTS exam they have the following sentence: The situation remained unchanged for the next two years until more universities were opened. I do not ...

This question was originally posted here: What is the term for a word that has come to mean the opposite of its orignal meaning? I don't think it should have been marked as a duplicate: the "...

I've noticed that use, and I like to learn more about the theory behind it. In that sense, why to choose this tense over the Simple Present. For example: When you are walking around Denver and ...

I came across the word "stane" in a poem in the Paris Review, and I can't seem to find a definition that fits its use in the poem. I checked several dictionaries. Some didn't have it at all, and those ...

I've often been confused how 'quite' can mean so many things and upon leaning that it comes from 'quit' I only have more questions. How did quit semantically drift to come to mean quite?

The idiom "to double to on sth" in the sense of "continuing to do something in an even more determined way than before" is mentioned in the Cambridge Dictionary. However, personally, I've heard this ...

We are familiar with the concept of "do support", where the verb do is used as a modal verb. It can be found frequently in Shakespeare and before and it is claimed to derive from the Celtic languages ...

"David and Emma live far away in the mountains." What grammatical role do the words "far" and "away" have in that sentence? I realize that "far away" must be an adverbial, that can be both a ...

I've been looking for phonological rules or explanation for the change that occurs in -ies ending plural form but all I found was : When we have a vowel before "y" we add "s", such as "boys". When we ...

I'd like to know why some inversions need an auxiliary and others don't need one. For example: "Little did I know about her" auxiliary + subject + verb Why not "Little knew I about her", which is ...

I'm looking for a sentence with two 'than's in a row. I'm sure they exist but I just can't think of one!

I have been thinking about this for quite a while and have done some research on it. What I have learned is that possessive pronoun+gerund is a structure that's more "formal", while object pronoun + ...

Please let me ask you native or very well-trained Eglish speakers if there’s some patterns, rules, or formulas in regards of an imperative sentence’s structure. For example, I was reading this ...

In Russia we have these "fire panels": So, they have tools like a bucket and a spade, so you can dig up some sand with the spade in the summer and extinguish the fire with it. Or in winter you can ...

I have been seeing increasing use of "membership to an organisation" (club, association etc.). The "to" makes my teeth grate, as I have always used "of". Should I continue to resist (I run a large ...

Recently I have read a book in chemistry field, and I have encountered this sentence: This is because typical metal Lewis acids are deactivated by the nitrogen atoms of the product formed that are ...

What is the difference between a supplemental noun phrase and a absolute clause? In these examples and in general. Is it just the non-finite nature of the second example? Are they not serving a ...

I hate how we format dialogue. I believe convention has gotten too heavy and we need to think a little more about logic. That being said, my question, to be more specific, is asking about labels for ...

Sources available on line say that the expression “Cyber Monday” is just a few years old, dating its coinage to 2005: The term "Cyber Monday" was dreamt up in 2005 by a marketing team at Shop.org,...

My 90 year old father has a saying, "I've been dragged through an auger hole and beat with a sut rake." It means you're worn out or have been treated badly. "Sut" pronounced almost like "soot." Not ...

When invited, she gladly said yes. In the above sentence, my book says the sentence is formed because ‘she was’ is omitted. And the sentence is the example of ellipsis of the same subject + be in the ...

I'm trying to read my way through The Boy at Mugby by Charles Dickens. The story is written in an 'accented' language, and there are a few words I'm having trouble making out: (The text excerpts are ...

A previous question (What part of speech is 'why' ?) asked what function 'why' was playing when it is used with a verb. But 'why' can be used without a verb. Why the sad face ? So what is it ...

Has The New Yorker changed its "who"/"whom" policy? Recently, I noticed--for the first time in fifteen years of more or less consistent readership---two occasions I considered non-standard, both from ...

I had never heard "in the essence of time" before a recent trip to Virginia. Various local attendees of a meeting I attended used the phrase to justify moving on to a new topic, in a situation where I ...

In his 2013 TEDx Houston talk The tyranny of the rocket equation, astronaut and International Space Station Flight Engineer Don Pettit humorously introduces two categories of mass launched from Earth ...

In casual conversation I've been noticing this more and more in my own speaking as well as others. The subject will be missing from the beginning of the sentence and instead it's inferred as the ...

Definition of 'shut' in Collins English Dictionary. Shut is also an adjective, with example sentence "The exit doors were locked shut." I wonder why 'shut' in this sentence is an ADJECTIVE not an ...

To identify human genes and understand their roles allows researchers to discover the cause of various diseases. To contain the meaning of 'by ~ing' or 'while ~ing', can you use 'to infinite' like in ...

... the body, authority, entity or person which establishes... Is it correct to use "which" in this case? Or should it rather be "who", since the last element of the list is a person?

Epizeuxis is a rhetorical device which is defined as involving immediate or close repetition of a word or phrase - 'Break, break, break, On thy cold grey stones, O sea!' (Tennyson) or 'There's a fox, ...

Many will know that there are differences in AmE and BrE pronunciation of the words "solder" and "salve". On the topic of "solder", there are already two questions here asking about the correct ...

Is it just me, or? All of the content you see on Stack Exchange—all the questions, answers, edits, reviews, users, badges, tags, and more—is stored in a relational database. Seems technically ...

In engineering/architectural drafting, many people consider grey lines - usually used to indicate existing work or reference work belonging to other disciplines - as "screened back". When older ...

I saw "mediaeval" on a Wikipedia page, and figuring it was a typo, edited it to "medieval", it was reverted as apparently mediaeval is the UK spelling. However, in all the dictionaries I've found from ...

Some people seem to use this phrase. The adjective 'Victorious' seems that it is being used as if it is part of the noun. Would this work in other cases? e.g. "Rome Sacrosanct". Is it technically ...

Do you know any website where I could search a word by a sound from it's IPA transcription ( for instance like ə and get awesome, jonathan etc.). Thank you

It's been many times when it comes to decide whether to use "-or" or "-er" as an agent noun suffix to a verb. My native (mother language) is Greek, and I'll try to provide you a way to think before ...

I've come across a comment in “it seems” vs. “it seems that” and I am uncertain as to what type of word allows raising. It's not necessary (though it's almost always possible) for any complement ...

I relied on the Logic of English (LoE) phonograms to give myself a better understanding of English pronunciation since the spelling gives me a hard time (even as native speaker), but I noticed that ...

For some verbs we can find another (not necessarily unique) verb which has the same meaning except that it corresponds the subject and the object in the opposite direction. For example, if I say “our ...

Example: "John jumped over the girl shouting angrily." I assume the participle construction replaces a relative clause in this case. ("who shouted angrily"). My question: Can a participle ...

E.g. the engineering that goes into the roads we travel on, the railways we use, the negative space in a painting, or any of the many systems that we depend on.