Wordwizard

Thanks for that. The provider that I use announced that they will shut down the old domain name servers after 30th April. I don't know how long it will be before the site finally becomes inaccessible, but it will probably be a matter of days. I have backed up the forum in its current form and will e...

Dear friends, The forums have now been made "read-only" except for the "Welcome to the Clubhouse" forum, which includes this thread, which I shall leave open to allow people to reminisce until such time as the site disappears at the end of the month. You should be able to respond to this topic and c...

To all Wordwizard contributors and readers. Please accept my apologies for my absence over the past weeks. My beloved dog Sheba, a grand old lady of nearly 14 is struggling with her health and I am spending every spare moment I can with her. I shall be shutting down the forum over the Easter weekend...

Erik_Kowal wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 5:36 pm since if it has no consequences there would be no point in starting a war.

And there is a point in starting a war provided that it has consequences?

My apologies to everyone for being out of the loop for a while. I have been nursing a rather sick dog in the free time I have had. I think we are over the worst now and that the old lady (yes, Sheba is nearly 14 now) will be with me for a few years yet! I have heard nothing further from the site own...

As far as timing is concerned, I have heard nothing from the site owner, who originally wanted to shut down in January. I fully expect to close the doors in February sometime. As far as politics is concerned, language is politics and politics is language. Even the way in which I think about language...

I really can't remember how good I was at the imperial system before I left the UK in my late 20s. After returning from Germany in my early 50s, I can only handle metric weights and measures and, in particular, temperatures. I really have little idea what a hot day is in Fahrenheit (and the spellche...

If you insist on two sentences, then b and c seem okay to me. The phrase "as well" sits most happily in final position. The phrase "as well as that" sits most happily in initial position. Don't ask me why.

Sentence 1 would need to be something like "He can't threaten us. If he does, it would be a crime". But I guess most people would go for something along the lines of "It would be a criminal offence for him to threaten us." I really can't make much sense of sentence 2 at all, at least not with "when"...

You have lost me. None of them sound like anything a native speaker would come up with.

The judicious use of "either" or "but" would probably resolve the problems.

Yes, very nice. But the pudding has been a little over-egged. It is a tendency, all other things being equal, but all other things are not always equal. The examples "tick tock", "flip flop", etc. are all well-established, and new examples are quite hard to find. The ablaut reduplication mechanism, ...

Only sentence 1 sounds in any way natural. Bear in mind, I do not read your posts. I listen to them. I cannot hear apostrophes. Only when I cannot understand what is going on do I actually look for apostrophes. In sentence 2, it sounded to me as if you had two fathers, which is unlikely. If you had ...

Sentences a and b seem fine to me. Sentences c and d do not sound entirely natural. They would probably work in speech, but I think most native speakers would go for something like "What experience do you have that makes you think you could/can run this company?" As far as whether any of the options...

It makes it the more poignant to see you here again. We have missed you, but I am glad to see that you are the same old WoZ.

Surely "acquaintance" references the depth of the relationship rather than the frequency. If I am a member of, for instance, a church, a political party or a walking club, there are many people that I meet frequently and possibly interact with quite often, but with whom I have no significant relatio...