Michelle,

A quick check on the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary gives the EE pronunciation first, followed by "also" and the I pronunciation. So either is correct (heh, heh).

Seriously... I happen to be an American English speaker living in Texas, and I work for a multinational oil-industry company. The Americans and Norwegians seem to prefer EE while the Canadians and Scots seem to prefer I. One of my college roommates, a girl from Iran, used EE, while the other, a South-African with a Boer last name, used I. A boss I had several years ago who came from Mumbai used the I as well.

I would conclude that the I pronunciation is probably used more by people whose speech tends toward the British as spoken in England and her current and former territories.

Anonymous, you had better be glad you hid your name. Take it from one who knows, it's easier to do a little research and look knowledgeable than to attempt to impress with your "superior intellect," get the matter totally wrong, and look like a moron.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary online tells us the prefix "kilo-" is "French, modification of Greek 'chilioi'," and the Greek word means "thousand."

The metric system was first proposed and adopted in France around the time of the Revolution (proposed 1791 and adopted by the French Revolutionary Assembly in 1795). This is when the prefix was first coined to represent the base measurement unit multiplied by 10 to the third power. Most of the other prefixes are also French derivations from Greek. Other prefixes did in fact come from Latin ("milli-") and, in modern times, the largest-magnitude prefixes derive from, for example, Spanish (pico-) and Danish (femto-).

So those of you who trace the K (meaning here "thousand") to the metric-system prefix "kilo-" are correct.

OK, take and spank me with a saguaro.... In the last post I was (naturally) assuming American English. OF COURSE all other English speakers on the planet, practically, say CV.

Ivy, there is a difference of opinion on whether and how words borrowed into English from other languages become part of English or remain part of their original languages.

Obviously, since we do not use accent marks in English, any words so adopted as English words will lose their accent marks.

Since the word "resume" is ubiquitous in English (we don't say CV, nor do we use a construction such as "statement of employment history"), I would argue (and I'm not alone) that it is now an English word and needs no accent marks.

Yeah. To get the plural, just add an S to your favorite of the three forms.

Incidentally, the plural of "CV" is "CVs," but the plural of "curriculum vitae" is "curricula vitae." Hooray for Latin.

Goossun, the word I see most often to refer to "no-smell" garlic capsules is "deodorized." Verb form, of course, is "deodorize."

How do they do it? The problem is probably garlic's high sulfur (sulphur for those of you across the pond) content. The body converts sulfur into various compounds that have strong smells. There are various ways of reducing the impact of the sulfur on the body. One effective, natural method is to package the garlic extract (the chemical compund allicin) in oil in a sealed capsule that also contains chlorophyll.

I typed badly but I'm not in a mood to care about it right now because I'm getting a new kitten as soon as I get off work. :)

Jun-Dai is strictly correct, but I should add that in most of the US the unaccented form is preferred; the accented form is thought of as a sort of affected overcorrectness.

One might think the accented form is foreign, However, I see many resumes from overseas (since I'm in the "oilngas bidness" in Houston), but 99 times out of a hundred they're just called C.V.'s (for "curriculum vitae").

Not to be pedantic, Jun Dai--although that IS exactly what I AM being, come to think of it--but my example did, in fact, show that "he" was the subject. Perhaps I should have made it clearer for you.

It may be useful to compare the common practice in certain Romance languages, where the article is used for pretty nearly all nouns. I've found French particularly illustrative, in which you may have la/le or un/une, corresponding respectively to "the" and "a" in English. One may think of a case like French as being "regular," following a standard usage rule, while the same case in English might be thought of as "irregular."

Maybe someone much more familiar with the use of the article in French, Italian, or Spanish could provide us with some typical examples.