So, what do you think of the dichotomy between fewer and less? Seems to me Anheuser-Busch did the greatest national disservice on this misusage with their original Miller Lite commercials ("one-third less calories than their regular beer") <cringe>. I remember Stuckey's (Stuckey'ses?) wel...

FM frequencies in the US start at 88.1 so I don't think that answer is wrong (I had that too). 88 might appear on the dial but 87 is sometimes used. The dial in Japan (and possibly other places) starts at 76 MHz. The US FM dial originally went from I think 47 to 54 MHz, when FM was developed by Edwi...

Iam replying to KT's request for a good curse word. I personally like RAZZLEFRATS !!. It feels really good to say this when you are frustrated. A longer variation on that one is "Razzlefrazzlesnazzlesnarts!" but I prefer one of the good old-fashioned four-letter expletives myself. 8) A re...

. . . As for Iraq + Iran = Irate, it reminds me of the plan to combine Dallas and Fort Worth into a single urban entity; what would they call it? "Worthless!" :wink: [duck] I like that one, although spelling it Worthlas would be an even better audio-visual pun. I'll have to remember that ...

Watching "Fargo" was like going home to me. I didn't realize til recently that "go with" was a local term. I've heard "go with/come with" occasionally for years from far-flung places including California. But I think the same form is used in German- therefore maybe als...

Just for the record, Ranger, I too put all 3 syllables in sauna, not being a Finn but having studied Finnish, and following the rule that a foreign word carries its native pronunciation. Well, all of us have been mispronouncing English words all along then. Brazilian dude --true, which recalls Fran...

Dismissing the English word for the removal of gas and focusing on the name of the French painter, what is the correct pronunciation of his name? Now, American and British pronunciation of French loanwords is very different. We Brits would stress the first syllable and not pronounce the s : saying ...

Maybe focussing is acceptable, but I hate it. I'm with you, o meu irmão. There's a sign on one lane of Canal Street in New Orleans that reads "Busses Only". It'll be interesting to go by there in a few days and see if the sign was blown away by Katrina and if so, whether they replaced it ...

Dinner. My mid western friends use this word to mean the mid day meal. Supper is the evening meal. Out west we say dinner to mean the evening meal. In SE PA we had (and they still have) breakfast, lunch and dinner, period. When we would visit our Mississippi cousins it was breakfast, dinner and sup...

Asking questions is one thing: tag questions are something else, aren't they? I think the idea is a discourse marker . We use tag questions because we make a statement and wish to ellicit a response from someone, don't we? And then there's the inverted syntax of "Going to the show, are you?&qu...

Hi. I'm new to the site and hope no one has asked this before but it's been bugging me! Does anyone hate that people don't know when to use the contraction 'you're' or the actual your? In school they taught us that if you can say 'you are' then that's when you use the contraction. I always thought ...

The Brits happen to treat the noun hospital as an "institution" not a "building."

DK, I think you just hit the nail on the head!

when I was a wee tyke from PA visiting maternal Mississippi relatives, a truck driver pulled into my uncle's service station and asked if we had "modall". Not having any idea what this might be, I went inside to my uncle and repeated exactly what I heard. Uncle Buddy handed me a bottle of ...

How many of you true Finns out there wince when you hear people mispronounce "sauna"? Just for the record, Ranger, I too put all 3 syllables in sauna, not being a Finn but having studied Finnish, and following the rule that a foreign word carries its native pronunciation. And your origina...

Anyway, my friend said the origins of "TIPS" came from a restaurant here in the USA where you paid TIPS ahead of time, the reason "to insure prompt service". Can anyone confirm this? Another prob I always had with this theory is that properly stated, the acronym would be TEPS (f...