A simple dictionary search reveals that "grow" is either transitive or intransitive. So what's all this old bollocks about, really?

Thanks for stating so clearly what I was trying to say!

How can a language degerate? Languages can degenerate and die when people stop speaking them. But more and more people are speaking English. It doesn't make sense to say that English is degenerating, since that's based on an idea of what English should be (static) rather than what it is (a living la...

I think "cal" refers to the other kind of lime. As in calcium.

Delay does enter into it, because aspiration is expressed in duration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspiration_%28phonetics%29 "There are degrees of aspiration. Armenian and Cantonese have aspiration that lasts about as long as English aspirated stops, as well as unaspirated stops like Spanish....

Mistakes such as "irregardless" and "I could care less" are legion. But they persist due to a combination of ignorance and carelessness. If one person makes it, it's a mistake. If a large number of people use them, they are no longer mistakes, they're part of the language. This ...

"to grow" is an action something does, not does to something else. I can grow, the company can grow, I can help the company grow, but it's the company that does the growing. When I grow a plant, I am causing the plant to grow. Same as when I grow a company. Just to be picky (moi?) the soi...

The literal meaning of "I could care less" means that it is possible to care less. But people who say "I could care less" obviously don't mean that. Which was exactly my point. Cheers! PS thanks Malachi for stirring up the dust of Chaos around here. Stimulating :) You're welcome...

"to grow" is an action something does, not does to something else. I can grow, the company can grow, I can help the company grow, but it's the company that does the growing.

When I grow a plant, I am causing the plant to grow. Same as when I grow a company.

It was a rhetorical question.

I don't mean to tie up all the threads with expert explanations. I'm just talking about stuff that interests me!

Do people really say "I could care less" when they mean "I couldn't care less"? Is it really their intention to convey the meaning that it is possible for them to care less about the thing in question? No. They mean that it is impossible for them to care less. The literal meaning...

hmm... all the links I found say "aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies the release of some stop consonants." That's a better definition than "Audible breath that accompanis or comprises a speech sound". When I studied phonetics, I learned that aspiration was a d...

but 'two,' is neither Germanic or Romance or Slavic, etc. and at the same time it is all of the above. its not exclusive to any of these and neither is the word German or Deutsch or Allemagne. No, "two" is Germanic in origin. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=two It's related to th...

A couple of my other most-loathed contemporary hack nonverbs: grow as in "we will grow this company" and speak to to mean speak of ... There's nothing weird with "grow" here. It's the same usage as "we will grow this plant." And "speak to" just has a differen...

Here are some word pairs in English that come from the same PIE root:

head chapter
cow butter
city Shiva
fat Irish (maybe)
lady paradise

and so on...

http://goofy.dreaming.org/journal/archi ... nates.html

audible breath that accompanies or comprises a speech sound That is not the definition of aspiration I am familiar with. "Audible breath that accompanis or comprises a speech sound" - by that definition all speech sounds are aspirated. My definition, which is the standard linguistic defin...