Discussion Forum
This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books.
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Normally, the plural of mouse is mice when you are referring to those real rodents. However, in the case of a “mouse” used for the computer, can you still use the plural form “mice”, “computer mice” if you are referring to lots of computer mouse? “Computer mouses” i guess is not proper. What do you think?
I have a question on the following excerpt:
And that means taking some time to effectively communicate the “vision” throughout the organization and to train all members to “view for improvement through cooperative effort” rather than “hunker down and protect turf.”
Does the last period of the sentence belong inside or outside of the quotation mark? The sentence “hunker down and protect turf” isn’t complete, so...what do you think? This is on the website of the company I work for.
Does anybody know what’s the lingustic term for the words like “wanna”, “gonna”, “outta”, “kinda” etc? Once I heard them being termed as “clitics” but I’m not sure if this term is really used in linguistic circles. So far I’ve come across the words like: gonna, wanna, outta, gotta, hefta (for “have to”), coulda, woulda, shoulda, needa, lotsa (”lot of”), kinda (”kind of”), betcha (”I bet you...”), gotcha (”got you”), supposta (”supposed to”) and also cuppa :) Any other ideas?
In a compelte sentence, you need a Subject and a Predicate. But what about the sentences that are, “Okay.”, “Yes/No/Maybe”, “Hello.” etc. Are they considered a Complete Sentence or thought?
Why is w pronounced double u, but m is not pronounced double n?
I have always been taught that subconscious was used when talking about the parts of your psyche that you are not aware of - “the subconscious mind” and that unconscious was a physical condition - “knocked unconscious”
Lately I have been hearing people interchange the two; most of the time it is someone using “unconscious” in place of “subconscious”.
Am I confused here? Are they interchangable?
You folks could probably answer this question better than anyone else I can think of. Is there any evidence that computer spell checkers help improve peoples’ unaided spelling skills? I ask because I believe it has helped mine. The immediate feedback offered as I type on a word processor seems to break any tendency I might have to start spelling certain words wrong all of the time.
No doubt there are educators, psychologists, and others who would argue that a spell checker makes us lazy and without the spell checker on the system we would soon regress to our primitive spelling roots. Maybe they’re right and my improved spelling is just a figment of my imagination, or perhaps a natural tendency that would have happened anyway after many years of writing.
I have seen both OK and Okay used regularly. If OK is correct what do the O and the K stand for? If Okay what is the origin? Thank you.
This has always irked me, as prior to communicating with Americans on the internet, I’d never heard expressions such as “it’s not that big of a deal” - what is wrong with “it’s not that big a deal”?
What is the extra “of” there for? It just sounds so awkward and out of place... is there a good reason for it? Is it even correct English?
I often come across this construction:
verb + ‘off’ + ‘of’ + object
I’ve never really heard it in spoken English and wonder if you can say the same without ‘of’.
Just one example here from EFL Geek:
... just to get it OFF OF my hands since I wasn’t using it anymore.
