Jim, what Nicholas is saying is that you were mixing singular and plural. it should be "a SIGNIFICANT figure", no "s" on the end. Referring to the original post, a small fraction of millions of dollars would be a lot of dollars, but the dollar amount would be only one figure.

Everyone, read Marsha's request a little more carefully:
"I work in the legal field and it is necessary to write out percentages."
It really doesn't matter what any style manual says. I'm no expert, but I do believe that, by law, percentages have to be spelled out in words when mentioned in contracts, etc.

Gee, I thought that "...big a deal" was the more colloquial, an elided form of "...big of a deal".

>
>...and I have heard "cherubs" used incorrectly many
>times (it should be cherubim).
>

What do you mean, Jennchick? "Cherubs" is also an accepted pluralization of "cherub", at least according to all my dictionaries.

Avrom, here is an allegedly complete list of english copula:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_copulas

Note, none of them seem to allow a sentence with the same me/I, him/he her/she issues to be constructed.

Oh, come one now. Bismarck. Certainly many may misuse overexaggerate, but one can construct a valid and correct (if somewhat stilted) sentence for every "over.." word you have listed... except for overinebriate, of course. No amount of inebriation could be considered excessive, so I would have to say there is no such thing as overinebriation.

I haven't heard gifting nearly so often as re-gifting, the recycling of unwanted gifts to uncherished relatives. As an aside, few seem to realize today that vacuuming has four syllables, not three.

I'm sure that there may be some pedants who will disagree with me, but agenda in modern English usage has become a singular noun referring to the list itself. Its plural is agendas. "Data" is teetering on the edge.

Joachim: "certificated" is correct according to, um, the dictionary: "To furnish with, testify to, or authorize by a certificate." It is synonymous with "certify", although might be considered more specific. It is quite commonly used in the aviation industry and appears everywhere in the Federal Air Regulations. I've always suspected that some influential public official ignorantly coined this word some time ago. Maybe in a few more years we'll all be saying "NU_CU_LAR" too.

I would suggest that, technically, "over" is not used as an adverb in this case because overexaggerate is actually one word, not two.
PS - overexagerrate is in the dictionary, meaning, not suprisingly, "...to go beyond anticipated exaggeration"