Wordwizard

In this general area you may want to consider: self-deceiving, self-deluding, letting oneself down, letting something/somebody get the better of one, not following one's destiny/dreams/stars, aiming low, not living up to one's potential, living in a fool's paradise, living in cloud-cuckoo-land, bein...

Ken, I like the sound of the competition, but following the link only took me to a generic submissions page which gave no details of the May challenge you mentioned. I have a feeling you can only view that page if you are a subscriber -- am I correct? Meanwhile, if my own case can be taken as a reli...

To which I'll just add that I don't think this expression is in common use in Britain.

If one chose the mock-terrapin soup from a false prospectus that also offered alligatawny, the experience would be truly ersatz... No, unreally!

Nina, I have a few comments about your form. Firstly, you have submitted this posting to four different forum areas of this site. This is not very considerate of our site visitors. Secondly, people would need to copy and paste your entire posting into theirs in order to give them a framework for the...

As in:

Here's a well-USed lawyer for sale,
Thrash him uphill and whack him down Dale.

?

Hmm... Judging by William's and Gary's apparent nonplussedness, it is the Americans among us who don't know A from C!

Bob, a 'fanny pack' is what you might call a 'bum bag'.

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,...