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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For a normal bibliography entry for an internet resource, one must include the author’s name, title of site, date of document, date of access, and of course the URL.
What happens if my resource is the excellent Wikipedia? A site that I do not know the original author of the article or the date the article was published? Would I have to leave all the info I don’t know blank, or add “Not Applicable?”
Also, if most of my references are from different articles (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Copernicus etc) but from the same website (Wikipedia) do they have to be seperate or listed all in the same entry?
Who thought of calling left, left, and right, right? Why don’t we say 1 and 2, or A and B to determine left and right? My sister really wants to know and I don’t have a clue.
I don’t think there are any rules about which adjectives come before others in describing something, but nobody would say “red big ball”. Unless they were emphasising the “red” part, as opposed to the *blue* big ball. In what order would you use “mediastinal”, “cystic” and “benign” to modify “teratoma”? Maybe it’s just a matter of what I want to emphasise more, eh?
When using numbers in a sentence to express a percentage, such as sixty-six and two-thirds percent, is it proper to use a hyphen between “66″ and “2/3″ or just a space?
It happened to me that I touched by accident the exhaust pipe of my motorbike when it was damn hot and got burnt.
Now, what would you say to questions like ‘What happened’? I always seem to carry over the pattern from Czech and look for a preposition such as ‘on’ or ‘by’ but it all sounds awful:
I got burnt ON/BY the exhaust pipe.
So I always end up resorting to either a long narrative or ‘It was the bike’...
Does anyone know where the term “zero conditional” comes from and why we use it for labeling the “unchanging Laws of Existence” conditional?
What does that “zero” mean?
(Looking for a bit of etymology here and not a desription of zero conditionals per se.)
“1. I am a carnivore and a predator though sometimes I will scavenge. I live in the Arctic where I stay by myself most of my life. I am well camouflaged in the snow, though my skin is actually black to absorb the heat of the sun. I will kill and eat seals and walruses, but I will also eat carrion, such as a dead whale. I love water and am such a strong swimmer that I can swim miles at a time. Who am I?” From rogerwilliamsparkzoo.org
How would the removal of “will” affect the meaning of the above passage? Would the writer’s intended effect still be fully appreciated?
Can you help me find the best word that covers the same concept as ‘mileage’ but for kilometers:
mileage (mileages) 1. Mileage refers to the distance that you have traveled, measured in miles. Most of their mileage is in and around town. N-UNCOUNT: also N in pl
Are such neologisms as ‘kilometerage’ or ‘kilometrage’ used in English?
Is there a set rule to capitalizing certain words in any given title (such as a book)? For example:
“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”
In that title, one doesn’t capitalize ‘the’ or ‘and’ (not counting the first). Which words should you NOT capitalize in a title? I once asked my English teacher, and she told me to capitalize the “little” words. o__o Can someone clarify that for me...?
For instance, a song:
“Here With You”
Would ‘with’ be capitalized or not? I consider that to be a relatively ‘small’ word...
I teach English to adults as a second language. I am having difficulty explaining to my current group the difference of “back” and “behind” and its usage. Can anyone help me out here.... FYI, I am teaching 3 26 year-olds with elementary (literally) knowledge of spoken English.
