Since English does not use accent marks, I do not use accent marks in words that have been fully assimilated into English.

I've never heard the word pronounced "re-zhu-may." Every time I hear people use it, I hear "reh-zoo-may" or even "reh-zoo-meh" (accent always on the first syllable, never the last one).

Heh. I couldn't see anything wrong with it, so I thought I'd wait to see what others said before I commented. The construction is not used in formal contexts, but it is fairly common in colloquial, "everyday" speech.

After checking a dictionary (American Heritage 2000), I notice that the construction is grammatically correct. Here's the part of the definition that applies:

10a. To continue to be in a certain condition or continue an activity: "go barefoot."
b. To come to be in a certain condition: "go mad;" "hair that had gone gray."

Notice that all the examples in the definition follow the form "go [adjective]" (as does "go kapakka"), but your first example looks like "go [noun]." This is actually OK. Most nouns may easily become adjectives, when they are used to modify other nouns (I do not know the formal grammar term for this). Examples of this are "Windsor knot," "Greenwich time," and "computer software." (We've talked about this in another thread a few weeks ago.)

Bad edit, sorry... the example sentence above should read "...those of her four older sisters."

Personally, I hate "different than" and go out of my way to avoid using it. But, strangely, when I hear it used, I rarely mind. Some usages sound better to my ear than others do, though.

Bad-sounding usages:

"His hat is different than her hat."
"You are different than any girl I've ever known."
"It's different than you think it is."

Somewhat OK-sounding usages:

"Our stock portfolio is different in many ways than it was during the early 80s oil boom."
"Her wedding gown was different than those of her four older sisters'."

I frankly do not know why some usages sound better to me. I do know that I can't think, offhand, of any other comparative that uses the word "from," except words that literally indicate increasing distance, such as "further." (Example: "She was further from the buffet than she was from the dance floor.")

Bear in mind that I have lived in Texas for seven years and in the American South for fifteen years before that.

Nate, that's cool. I've never heard it. A Google search on "high society" combined with "thousand dollars" returns less than 600 hits. The only hit that I see that links the two in meaning as you do is the hit for this page!

I'm interested. You may have the chance to do a little linguistic fieldwork. Where do you live? What sort of people do you hear using the term this way?

Yeah, Jimmy, that's what I was avoiding... :)

No, Jappy, Merge is only partially correct, because their solution fails to take into account the possessive. You must have the apostrophe after the word "weeks" for the phrase to be properly rendered.

Second question first.

Did you know that the term "buck" was also applied to black men during the time that the United States (however united or disunited at the time) embraced the institution of slavery? Well, it turns out that this usage has nothing to do with "buck" for a dollar, which actually comes from buckskins (deerskins; the male deer is a "buck") used as a barter "currency." The ever-useful Snopes urban legends site has the story here: http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/buck.htm

The best explanation I've heard for "grand" is that it originated in betting on horse races, and that it was used as the name for the largest denominated bill in normal circulation. A modern, equivalent term, is "large," as in, "My wheels set me back fifty large," for "This car cost fifty thousand dollars."

Check out this Language Hat post for some more slang terms related to US currency: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000496.php

Well, now, that's true. I've never been to England, though. Is there an English speaker from England in the house? We could use a good breakdown of how the R drops in various dialects in England.

What an interesting observation. I've always thought that the opposite was more usually true, and that spelling followed pronunciation. Of course both views are true, since languages are much older than the individual speakers could ever be, and the diversity in English, in particular, is rich and strange.

Without doing research (I am, as usual, wasting time at work), I seem to remember that the particular change from "s" to "z" resulted not from a passive growth in one direction or another, but from active spelling reforms made by Webster (he of the dictionary) and his colleagues near the beginning of the founding of the U.S. (He also is said to have advocated other phonetic spellings, such as "tuf" for "tough.") I think that since classical Greece and Rome were idealized during that period, Webster and his cronies were trying to cause written English to adhere more closely to his day's understanding of how classical Greeks and Romans might have spelled the words--but that's only my conjecture.

As far as the "r" in "word" and "bird" and "are" is concerned, the "r" would not be there in the first place unless it represented a sound, I think. I know that English is not particularly consistent in this respect, but it is not particularly inconsistent either. At some point speakers of English in England did drop the R, but I seem to recall that the dropped R began among the socioeconomic upper class and did not become widespread in England until after the US gained its independence.

I may of course point to Boston as a place where US speakers do regularly drop the R, and of course here in Texas and the South speakers often overpronounce the R in the middle of words and/or drop it at the end.

Speaking of spelling and how it conforms to pronunciation--I once made an Irish friend laugh out loud by voicing my frustration with spelling in Gaelic. What I had said was, "The rule for spelling Irish Gaelic is to take the alphabet, throw out half the letters you think should be in the word, and spell at random with the remainder."