Wordwizard

Louis, in the light of your etymological ejaculation, please substitute 'French word for sugar' for 'Ecuadorean unit of currency' in my request for elucidation. By the way, when you force us to guess at what you mean when you use a given word in a non-standard manner, aren't you compelling us to ste...

Louis, I willingly admit that in this posting I am but a mentally lumbering and under-endowed midget wandering aimlessly in a wondrous land peopled by towering intellectual colossi, so I would indeed be most grateful if you would tell me what the Ecuadorean unit of currency has to do with either Scr...

Edwin, you truly are a word viz.

So, Louis, my "attitude about "Idiom" is stultifyingly Anglo-centric", eh? Well, in that case you had better lump me in with the complex-burdened hoarders that cling to their absurdly fanciful notion that the way the vast majority of people use a word actually indicates that it has any definite sign...

Yes, it's his way of making a nuance of himself.

I looked at Richard Quinn's advice to purchasers of translation services, which is a field I am familiar with. The first thing that struck me was how poorly Richard Quinn (by his own admission, a former translator) had written and checked his own writing before publishing it to the Web. For instance...

In that case it is perhaps too much to hope for that Shakespeare ever introduced a scene with "Meanwhile, back at the dude ranch..."

Similarly to the 'pedal TV' that WoZ mentions, in Britain an old-fashioned valve radio set, or even a radio broadcast, is sometimes jocularly referred to as 'steam radio'.

I managed to find the fourth example given by Dale by Googling a fragment of the text he cites and clicking on the cached version of the hit. This led me to http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:OOIfY1w90yQJ:www.litob.com/mainstream/mainstream0145.html+%22would+show+up+to+policeman+the+Bejiqis,+but+c...

Julie, you could look up 'coerce' in a thesaurus to find single-word equivalents. Otherwise, 'put on the pressure' and 'charm someone into submission' are the only idioms I can think of for the moment.

My mistake, apparently. You do at least appear to be consistent with the statement contained in the topic 'BLOG' for Dale which I so grievously misrecalled: "GUYs, Words do NOT have meaning,, Only people DO. Words can "have" meaning only in a container sense." In the light of this fact I must reword...

Wiz, we must remember that according to Louis his words have no inherent meaning -- only things do. So our expectations of coherence from that quarter will need to be reduced accordingly.

By which I take you to mean the previous New Labour administration.

One established military phrase that seems ripe for application in the context of public relations and marketing is 'collateral damage', meaning 'the destruction or distortion of a PR message through the unintentional release or emergence of contrary facts'. (Think Tony Blair/GWB and the non-evidenc...

Well that doesn't tell us anything useful at all, beyond hinting that you have both a wife and a mistress. Which is hardly useful to know either.