Wordwizard

Bob, you are quite right. My fault for not reading Lili's post carefully enough before responding; apologies all round.

Of course, car engines also have piston bores in their blocks. This strikes me as being intuitively a more likely automotive association than 'the full bore of the gas line' explanation, since a piston reciprocating back and forth in its engine block seems a much more powerful image than the notion ...

These are called 'palindromes'. If you search for that word on this site, you will encounter quite a few postings devoted to them.

Walter, perhaps what Hans meant was that this site has driven him towards other forms of addiction. Surgeons (and physicians) have good access to happy-making meds, you know!

What Ken is describing is simply a retail accounting method that excludes factors that can be predicted to produce anomalous revenue results; one such is the new store that will take some time to generate sales momentum, and which is therefore not included in the calculations. The financial results ...

Ken, that was a most interesting excavation of the history of the word, even though nothing conclusive emerged.

When you started off your discussion with your account of the dark matter seminar, I also expected you to mention the "whole shebang" theory of the origin of the Universe...

How appropriate to spend eternity looking for something in Time...

Maybe what phrase falls most readily from your lips depends on which part of Britain you're from. If I invoked any kind of hypothetical hangout of the gods to express disbelief or disagreement, it would probably be "Good Heavens no!" in preference to "Heavens no!" (I'm from the Thames Valley region,...

Hmm. I first saw this spoof in 1997, and it is still fairly funny. However, it is worth mentioning that German is not in fact one of the principal languages in which EU business is conducted, even though Germans might wish it otherwise. According to the abstract of an article by Paul Wood in the Aug...

Of course, the 1940 description makes it clear that the '-on' suffix in 'nylon' was not novel, and the selection of the 'nyl-' prefix was influenced by both 'no' and 'new', even if merely negatively. So one could still argue that the coinage 'nylon' is only novel up to a point.

Hmm. I can see that while this might be important in a patterned quilt, the element of repetition does not seem to me to be essential for a pattern to be identified in intelligence data of the kind that Bliar was referring to. While some kinds of activity may be repetitive (e.g. when someone makes a...

I take this to mean that Blair believes that Britain's intelligence service very rarely makes mistakes in its conclusions about the significance of patterns of intelligence data ; here 'pattern' is being used to mean 'a cluster of items of information that collectively point to a particular conclusi...

That last posting implicitly raises the question of whether the 'suicide shift' was the automobile-like foot-operated clutch which would engage drive even when the rider needed his feet on the ground to keep his machine stable, or the hand-operated gear lever that left only one hand grasping the han...

It means that Chiara Mastroianni has tried to keep her private life private.

Another example:

Employer: "Today, I want you to concentrate on identifying new sales leads."
Employee: "Yes, we were already planning to do just that."

He probably helps corporations and/or the bank he works for to devise strategies for coping with either currency exchange rate or interest rate fluctuations, or both. Without more context it's not possible to be sure which it is.