Wordwizard

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.

I just read Erik's post and thought to myself "at least life can't get any worse now.

It just did.

Where did you dredge that one up from, Bob?

Which is, without putting too fine a point on it, where many surnames come from. Miller, Thatcher, Carpenter ... I do wonder why we never had a bigger steel industry in this country, given the number of Smiths we have. And then there's Southampton's Austrian manager Hasenhüttl, which is Austrian dia...

Only 1 is ever likely to be said by a native speaker. It would usually mean "the guy called Tom who works at the Post Office - you know, the tall one with the big nose - told me ...". In other words, it identifies a specific "Tom" from among several that the speaker and listen might know. If any oth...

I'll add my name to the list of those who have never seen it. I think trolley is right. Merriam-Webster gives "slew" as an alternative spelling of "slough" in the sense of "a place of deep mud" or a "swamp". Having said that, I don't see the expression "slough hole" being used either. But as trolley...

Your questions are more philosophical than linguistic. In women's studies, "toxic masculinity" has long been used, primarily referring to the prevailing understanding of "macho" masculinity. More recently, the term is being used outside of academia, particularly in the US. Its meaning seems to vary ...