New answers tagged american-english
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Perhaps a Predicament?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/predicament
an unpleasantly difficult, perplexing, or dangerous situation.
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Contretemps? https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/contretemps I assume you mean a minor incident, since it can't very well be positive to describe something as uncomfortable!
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"Awkward situation" https://www.dictionary.com/browse/awkward (Hard to deal with; difficult)
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Yeah nah is a kiwi (New Zealand) slang.
We have said it for decades.
It is not Australian.
Kiwis say yeah... acknowledging what the other person is saying but nah, don't agree or not gonna do that or just meaning no thanks.
It's very very common here in NZ.
There are even T shirts at our airports with yeah nah written on the front.
It's as common as ...
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In my opinion the following looks more easy and professional
Log In Using Your Mobile
Or log in using other methods
Continue as a guest
Giving more easiness to the users in UI or systems to understand it, is the basic necessity.
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"Power cut" is certainly the most common in the UK, as seen in the comments. Lexico Oxford Dictionaries gives the phrase the "British" tag.
On Google News, almost all of the news is UK stories, and it's the same story ;-) for power outage in the US.
As for blackout being used as a term for a mass outage in the UK, the fairly recent mass power cut that ...
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When it comes to nt reduction to n in American English that results in winter and winner being pronounced the same, there is an entry in J. C. Wells' blog about it:
http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/11/winter-and-winner.html
Here are the most relevant extracts:
The environments in which nt-reduction operates seem to be the same as those for t-...
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I'm not going to answer the question as to whether these are separate phonemes. That depends on the definition of phoneme, and which native speaker you ask. I will try to answer the question as to why some guides treat these as separate phonemes.
Summary of answer: one reason these guides say they are separate phonemes might be that they are written by ...
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No, they do not.
The diphthongs /ɪə, eə, ʊə/ found in Received Pronunciation stem historically from the sequences of /iː/, /eː/ (now /eɪ/), or /uː/ + /r/. In about the 16th century, /iːr/ etc. started to become realized more like [iːər] etc. Later they became more like [ɪər] etc. At this point it would be unreasonable to posit the diphthongs as phonemes ...
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I think both could be correct:
"Your rope is going to break!"
(I agree I would not use 'tear' with a rope - tear is more applicable to a sheet, of fabric or paper...)
This phrase could be said as a warning if one rock climber had seen his friend's rope starting to fray (fibres begin to break) after rubbing on a sharp rock.
"Your rope is going to be ...
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In American English at least, it's standard to use an auxiliary in these questions, except if you invert the sentence:
How many children do you have?
You have how many children?
How many house have you owned? (past)
How many houses do you own? (present)
How many houses do you have? (present)
I don't think usage differs from what the OP has given as ...
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The hard T you mentioned concerning how and when Americans use it, is something I believe you are not hearing it properly. You used the word thought and you stated that much of the time you hear 'tot' instead. That is certainly not how a vast majority of Americans pronounce the word and that's down to regional accents.
I'm a citizen of the US and live in ...
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X bets against the odds means that X makes bets on low odds.
When you bet for the underdog, it is called betting "against the odds." For example, if odds are 3/1 for the Cowboys this Sunday, then it is three times more likely that they will lose than win. (Wikihow)
To win by betting against the odds, it helps to (a) know the material well, or (b) hedge ...
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I'm not aware of this being a common pronunciation in any English dialect.
A common feature of American Black English (aka AAVE) is reducing consonant clusters at the ends of words, e.g. "west" will be pronounce like "wes". See Linguistic Features of AAVE
So in the skit, I believe the characters are trying to appear more educated by overcompensating, ...
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likely to derive from disputes between sheep farmers and cattle ranchers from American west - relates to having a beef with someone. Think of the 50's movie Shane partly based on those wars
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"State of the art" should really be hyphenated in that sentence, as in "state-of-the-art destroyer". "State of the art" is a common phrase (being used as an adjective here) that basically means having the best current technology.
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https://ggweather.com/winds.html
Norther A cold strong northerly wind in the Southern Plains of the
United States, especially in Texas, which results in a drastic drop in
air temperatures. Also called a Blue Norther. (Glossary of Weather
and Climate)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Norther_(weather)
A Blue Norther, also known as a Texas ...
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The following extract shows all main dialectal variants for informal plural forms of you:
Although there is some dialectal retention of the original plural ye and the original singular thou, most English-speaking groups have lost the original forms. Because of the loss of the original singular-plural distinction, many English dialects belonging to this ...
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The things she had told him couldn't be got out of her by just anyone.
It is just a matter of usage. Both are correct.
The Americans might use gotten and the British might use got. But gotten is slowly creeping into the British Usage too.
Here is a link to show the difference.
https://jakubmarian.com/got-vs-gotten-in-english/
Here is another ...
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Court filings and judicial opinions use a different register of English than common speech. They are drafted in such a way that they will achieve their purpose and not get overturned or rejected, and that involves careful attention to precedents and authorities (this is a common law jurisdiction, after all). So all of these are very sound motivations for ...
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This should not be surprising. According to the Farlex Book of Grammar's Mood section:
We usually use emphatic do to stress the fact that something is the case.
Courtroom proceedings are largely concerned with doing two things:
The first is settling questions of law to determine how the law might apply to a certain case, and the other is determining ...
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The law profession and law enforcement have for many decades been noted, cited, criticized and ridiculed by English usage experts and amateurs for their own bloated, pompous, convoluted and often mangled and torturous use of the language. Legalese and police-speak plague us still, and this is one great example of pomposity. It’s so common there are movements ...
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"Aught" and "ought" (the latter in its noun sense) strictly speaking mean "all" or "anything", and are not names for the number 0. Nevertheless, they are sometimes used as such in American English, for example, "aught" as a placeholder for zero in the pronunciation of the calendar year numbers.
As Wiktionary states -
aught (plural aughts)
whit, ...
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Acceptance is correct term. The acronym DTAP is short for Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production.[1][2] It is a rather common acronym in ICT expressing a phased approach of software testing and deployment. The four letters in DTAP denote the following common steps:
The program or component is developed on a Development system. This development ...
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Pity, Craig Philips answer has been deleted. It was he who mentioned that the British English expression was featured in the popular BBC quiz show, QI.
The QI episode, which mentions knobstick weddings is to be found in Series K, episode 4, Knits & Knots, broadcast in 2013, and hosted by Stephen Fry.
Stephen Fry: If you want to tie the knot at a ...
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Nowadays, British English speakers may also use "shotgun wedding."
The British National Corpus has a large number of samples of British English through the mid-1990s. Here are the three results that come up for shotgun wedding.
. Of course somebody, Who Shall Be Nameless, would bring up the subject of Burns-And-You-Know-What, and how many of his ...
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Historically, the term knobstick wedding was used in British English, though the term is now obsolete. From Wikipedia:
A knobstick wedding is the forced marriage of a pregnant single woman
with the man known or believed to be the father. It
derives its name from the staves of office carried by the church
wardens whose presence was intended to ensure ...
2
Neither Alex nor Ali can achieve their dream.
If they are unsuccessfully pursuing a dream put forward by one of them it matters which: John dreams of being able to fly. Neither Alex nor Ali can achieve his dream.
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I would say,
Neither Alex nor Ali can achieve her dream.
The pronoun will refer to the subject closest to it. In this case, pronoun refers to Ali.
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In his 1879 Decoration
Day,
an oration at the Academy of Music, New York, Chauncy Depew credited his
use of "talking through his hat" to "the slang phrase of my Bowery
friends":
After reading all the speeches, some good, some indifferent, some bad
and some incomprehensibe, except on the theory best expressed by the
slang phrase of my Bowery friends ...
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Note: Other answers have addressed various aspects of the posted question quite well. This answer focuses on a request made in a comment beneath the currently accepted answer: "Can you trace the beginning of the negative connotation of the phrase though?" The answer to that question, it seems to me, is relevant to the poster's more general questions about ...
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The answer is no - the way you said it was correct. In the phrase "you're welcome", welcome is an adjective (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/welcome). Saying "you're welcomed" would be as weird as saying "you're talled" or "you're beautifulled".
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Language, especially the English language, can sound very strange. Further, because something is popular doesn't mean it's correct.
To say "you're welcome" is poor grammar. "You're" is the contracted form of "you are". "You" is the subject and "are" the verb.
Now, in the case of "welcome", the actual verb in "you're welcomed" is "to be welcomed" making "...
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"Treated" means processed in this context, here's a relevant quote from wikipedia:
To make the parchment more aesthetically pleasing or more suitable for
the scribes, special treatments were used. According to Reed there
were a variety of these treatments. Rubbing pumice powder into the
flesh side of parchment while it was still wet on the frame was ...
2
It is an idiomatic usage of “given” as a (preposition):
If you say given something, you mean taking that thing into account.
Given the uncertainty over Leigh's future I was left with little other choice.
(Collins Dictionary)
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Now that we are beginning an impeachment inquiry, this is coming up every hour of every day and most are saying it the “British” way (accent second syllable). My theory is this: it’s not actually a common word here except in philosophical circles, and politicians do not want to sound “over educated” (which the first-syllable stress version may appear to be) ...
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So, you grabbed both your initial definitions from Wikipedia. But if you simply click on the "take the cake" hyperlink there, the Wikipedia entry for that phrase reveals the "bad" or "egregious" definition of the phrase ALSO EXISTS IN THE U.S. In fact, as a Canadian, where we have some British holdovers, but mostly operate with an American lexicon, I am more ...
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No. The noun form is "intrigue".
I find it hard to believe that several writers use "intriguity"... unless you include the copywriters for the advertising material of the Indian IT company of that name: http://www.intriguity.com/
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It is not formally recognized (yet) by any dictionary of which I am aware, which is the usual metric for "real" English words. The closest words I can think of that conveys the same meaning might be fascination or interest.
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It is a "real word" in the sense that it is something that is attributed a colloquial, informal definition.
It is not a "real word" in the sense that it is in the dictionary.
If the word catches on, it could possibly earn an entry.
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The have to meaning, especially when got is not preceded by have, is typically used in spoken speech in very informal contexts (if it appears in writing, it is normally just a transcription of something spoken). In such spoken contexts, this got to is typically pronounced as gotta, and in writing it is often transcribed as such (see e.g. here). Thus, in ...
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Grammarly doesn't know what you're writing or who you're writing it for. The good news is that you know better than Grammarly here. In the kind of texts where we use bulleted or numbered lists—for example in recipes, or instructions—it's very common and often better to omit articles, auxiliary verbs and certain other so-called function words.
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N.B. Below is an image of the American dish, biscuits with gravy. Note that a biscuit in the US is similar to a scone, a type of cake.
Photo: Lizzie Munro/Tasting Table
This is what British speakers usually think of when using the term biscuit, a type of plain “cookie”
Image source: The Guardian
The following definitions of the idiom, take the biscuit, ...
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