Wordwizard

Not really, at least not for me. One of the problems is also with the collocation "not boring". This falls into the category of "damning with faint praise". It is not really an enthusiastic endorsement of the play and sounds as if the speaker is trying to find something nice to say. Or perhaps the s...

We simply wouldn't do it like that. We would either use two positives ("not boring" = "interesting" > "His play was interesting and original"), or we would reverse the order so that the "not" clearly only modifies "boring": "His play was original and not boring". That said, a modifier in front of "o...

Here's a piece of cross-linguistic confusion. In German, a file of children would be said to be walking "im Gänsemarsch" (literally "in a goose march"). "Goose stepping", on the other hand is referred to as marching "im Stechschritt" (something like a "punching out" or "pricking" step). It has, in t...

In all cases, "either" sounds better. The only one of your alternatives that could possibly be used is "also".

I admit that I have come across a theory that "arse" was a later invention, but that doesn't make it right. Nope, I have visited this one before: The presence of the "r" goes right back to proto-Indo-European and is still present in all Germanic languages. "Ass" for backside is only attested from t...

On the day of his death, the media in the UK is tying itself in knots trying to avoid any suggestion that Prince Philip might have been a racist and a bigot. Instead, he was "gaffe-prone" or a "colourful character". Perhaps that should be a "character of colour"... If there is anyone out there I hav...

My feeling is that "juice" is used by many people (in the UK) for petrol in a car. It is also used by electricians and tradespeople to mean electricity ("turn on the juice", etc.). I don't think I often hear it among ordinary folks so much in reference to electricity, and I personally find it very s...

I can't see anything wrong with Bob's answer.

Either form can have either meaning, and I cannot see any way of stressing the utterance that would make the precise meaning clear. As Erik says, it is only pragmatics that might reveal the meaning. But perhaps there is nothing in the discourse or situation that disambiguates the meaning. In that ca...

Erik is spot on. Some simpler examples: I'm not deaf; neither am I stupid. I'm not deaf; nor am I stupid. It's not in the kitchen; neither is it in the lounge. The construction is often used over two sentences. I chose to use a semicolon instead. I could also have used a dash. Whatever punctuation I...

They seem okay to me.

That is correct, but I would add what I always say whenever you try to use punctuation to distinguish different meanings: Punctuation is at best a poor reflection of spoken intonation and rhythms, not the other way round. It is the pause in speech that conveys the difference in meaning. The comma is...

It would never be natural to say that Frank Lampard is/was a good footballer :o :o . That aside, your suggestion is perfectly okay. That is exactly the way the idiom is used. It certainly is a very odd idiom. Ken had a little to say about it a very long time ago: http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/vie...

This is an example of a concept that, in theory at least, demands somewhat complex syntactical structures if we are to express it with the formal accuracy expected, say, in academic writing. Many of your questions raise similar issues. If we want to express such concepts in speech, where we have no ...

Odd one. It seems to me that the use of "of" in this construction is more the result of considerations of prosody than anything else.

"More of" rolls off the tongue more easily in speech.