Wordwizard

Thanks, James. I'll get better at this! Long way to go to the magic 1000th posting still.

Quoc, I'm with you in not understanding that last comment. You can say, "You should stop in next time you're up my way," and that would be a completely OK comment.

I should know better than to post and then not return to the site for a few days. Sorry, Erik, for the slow reply. Apparently the issue is one of the Equal Time rule, and the Washington Post, at least, doesn't seem to make a distinction between shows run on cable versus those on networks. See the ar...

And if he got into the election, it could mess up his TV show. They can't show reruns of Law and Order with Fred Thompson in them during the campaign, so Comedy Central isn't likely to let Colbert's "candidacy" get too far.

I have to weigh in here. In spoken English, I often end sentences with prepositions, but I find that, when writing and having a little more time to consider my words, it is often clearer to avoid that construction. "What team does David belong to?" is short and not very confusing, but I've heard and...

Quoc, your interest seems to be in the use of the article "the." In that regard, I would opt for 2 rather than 1 because "future goals" is a bit nebulous--"the future goals" implies that there is some set number or even set goals, but the fact that you're defining them seems to indicate that you don...

Joy, this sounds like a trick question, since either is correct, depending on your meaning. If you mean that you want the person to correct billing errors and that will give you the permissions you need to send payment, you would use "may send our payment." However, generally, you are wanting to tel...

LOL. I'll try something like that next time.

Quoc, I think my WW pals may be over-thinking this issue. You are talking about multiple people in your example (many companies with many different owners). Therefore, if you choose to use your construction, you would write "The matter is that we must know who are the real owners of companies..." "L...

And you guys are just determined to make me do remedial physics by looking up things like "inductance" and "coulombs." Well, I'll show you and just stay ignorant!

And this is relevant of nothing, but I had to share it (and the title of this section is "Miscellaneous")--today was election day for mayor of Birmingham. At my polling place, there was a very large sign announcing "Your ID will be required to vote today." I bit my lip to keep from asking the (very ...

Thanks for the fun, Berale. But I have to say that, after telling us about her flatmate saying her nose was twitching because she was about to "cheese," the idea of "cheesing on toast" wasn't all that great an idea on which to end.

Quoc, the problem with your example is that it's not correct grammatically. Using the -ing construction after "if" generally involves an elliptical expression (oh, my grammar vocabulary is very bad tonight). For example, "If [one were] walking down the road, one can see the church." I can't come up ...

Wow! The things you learn (or almost learn) on WW. I never knew there was a "henry," so I looked it up. It apparently has something to do with physics, which is the one subject I did poorly in in high school. Here's what Merriam-Webster says, and I confess I didn't have enough interest to look up mo...

Well, I'm from the south, too, and confess that I can't recall too many conversations involving "claret," but I'm afraid I do (or did until today) pronounce the T.