Wordwizard

Thanks, Ken, for a useful summary describing an all-too-common phenomenon. You might also like to take a look at this description of Parkinson's Law, which states that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion". The book of the same name in which its propounder, C Northcote Parkins...

For some light relief:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=22548&p=75882

It seems that I'm not alone in finding the coverage excessive: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/apr/10/bbc-flooded-with-complaints-over-prince-philip-coverage The story in The Guardian summarises just how much of the BBC's regular programming was pulled from the airwaves in order to accommodat...

The other wordings that I've heard being used to decorate or obfuscate Prince Philip's racism are "forthright" and "He spoke his mind". I've been trying all day to get away from the Duke of Edinburgh, but every damn BBC broadcast channel has been given over to picking over his life in exhausting det...

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

Purely because of the apparent emphasis given to the temporal aspect in 2), I would tentatively link 1) with b) and 2) with a). But the context in which the utterance is embedded would be the chief guide to the intended meaning. As far as the emphasis is concerned, if the intention was to underscore...

The pairing of "neither / nor" to describe phenomena in two or more negative terms is a familiar one, e.g. The government's decision is neither fair nor sensible. The president was neither sharp, nor well-informed, nor given to acting in good faith. However, either word can be used to introduce a fo...

It's pretty common here in the UK... By which I mean that I've said it myself, especially when I was still using the phone I had before this one.

8 ) is the best (and most obviously appropriate) formulation. 7) is understandable, though the mismatch in grammatical number is an issue. 9) strikes me as an unnatural utterance. A native speaker would surely speak of "the {best / most competent (etc.)} technician" rather than "the most technician"...

Not in my book. I think it works perfectly well in formal usage. In fact, I think it is the most businesslike of the usages for comparisons of this kind. The ranking from formal to informal goes 1), 2), 3). The formulations that don't work are 4) and 5). In the absence of supporting context, both (a...

navi wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:43 pmWould 'altogether' mean 'on the whole' or 'entirely' in '2'?

It functions there as a general intensifier: I think trying to pin down a more precise meaning is a bit of futile exercise because achieving precision isn't the point here.

Agreed. The use of "of" even in the singular strikes me as being rather an oddity, grammatically speaking.

But who am I to argue with the collective decision of the speakers of English?

How would you pluralize 1) and 3)?

To my mind, sentences 2) and 4) somewhat suggest that what the speaker found differed from what they had expected. They sound more conversational than 1) and 3), which I would expect to find primarily in writing, and whose slightly more formal tone I associate with factual descriptions more than opi...

I said things whose truth I didn't know.
I said things without knowing if they were true.