Wordwizard

Eric, So (sew), for ( four, fore) we (whee, wee) here (hear) at Homonyms, Homophones, and Homographs International the question boils down (goose or otherwise) to (two, too) whether (weather, wether), there (they’re, their) is at this time (thyme) a word which (witch) will (bequeath, wish, desire, e...

Eric, I don't have a term, but I can expand on the example:
There, there now; they're there in their house. There you go! So there

This is just the sort of information I am looking to find. Thank you much.

Eric, Your task is daunting indeed! I've spent most of my life studying the German language and am still constantly coming across obscure cognates. One I came across a few years ago and which still entertains me is "Zimmer" (room) and its cognate "timber", a "Zimmermann" also being a carpenter. I am...

Rob,
Was she not his near missis?

I think I follow. If a near miss is a near hit, then a miss is as good as a hit. It follows then that if I narrowly avoid a collision, I had a near miss, and if I narrowly avoid a near miss, I collided.

So if a man finds himself surrounded by a bevvy of single girls at a party, one of them he'd been engaged to and broken it off, could his near miss have been a near miss?

Paul, No, I wouldn’t agree that a near miss is a hit. And I don’t have a problem with ‘near miss.’ ‘Near’ is just an adjective describing how close the miss was (just as ‘near future’ informs us that an event is not far off, and certainly not in the ‘far future). If one misses a target (date, goal, ...

Stopper questions like this bemuse me. It prompts me to again assert---- WORDS HAVE NO MEANING, only people do. Nouns from verbs can only have a refined definition judgmentally. One mans "near miss" is another's MILE.
2k4dec30fri17:55,lneil

Paul, no,they missed each other but geez it was a close (near) call. I totally agree with you on the definition supplied - it beats me how one can have an accidental collision that is narrowly avoided. Maybe the word "potential" in lieu of "accidental" is more appropriate. I might be wrong [and feel...

V and Wiz, What I am going to attempt to do is to make some sense out of the large quantity of ‘Jack the Bear/bear’ information above, along with the stuff I have dug up. The problem, as I see it, is that we have two ‘Jack the Bears’ with two distinct and opposing personalities. It’s Jack the swift ...

WoZ - thanks for the answer - I suspected it went back a little more than the 1940's.

Seems that Jack the Bear WAS one of Ellington's immortal hits from the 40s and also the title of a movie starring Danny de Vito but it also seems that good old Jack the Bear as an expression has taken on a whole new life .. here's a sample of what turned up for me >>> Urban dictionary: Jack the Bear...

Vladimir, The bare-bones answer to this question is provided in Ask The Wordwizard, but I’ll fill in some of the interesting details. DOUBLE CROSS or DOUBLECROSS: Today ‘doublecross’ is a noun (and a verb) meaning 1) an act of betrayal or swindle of a colleague, a deliberate violation of an agreemen...

I'm more concerned with driving on "Parkways" and parking in "Driveways"..