In the minds of most people, dictionaries and usage guides are a cipher to some presumed existing canonical, regulated definition of what is correct in the English language. Of course, no such canonical definition exists—grammaticality of English is governed only by the bulk of actual usage.

Most publishers of English dictionaries long ago abandoned any idea that they might set forth what is and is not correct in English—those few that actually did ever hold such a belief were few and far between. Modern English dictionary are described at least in a bit, although typically they may come with some level of usage advice. Merriam-Webster tend to be more descriptive than most, countencancing many usages criticized by others. The American Heritage Dictionary has its “Usage Panel” of experts on language and the usage notes in the dictionary cite percentages of experts who approve or disapprove of questionable usages. The Oxford English Dictionary is widely revered as the canonical collection of English words, and it is certainly an amazing work of scholarly endeavor, most interesting in its coverage of historical English. How did OED hold it’s official status?

Most regulation we have today are style guides—such as the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, and The MLA Style Manual. These are of course binding only on the writing governed by the producers of those style guides, but they are used by many writers who are not required to follow them.

Who are the professional poets, authors of such works as the Dictionary of Disagreable English and the Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, who berate various usages and pronunciations they don’t like, citing whatever evidence supports their preferred usage or pronunciation, and ignoring the evidence that doesn’t.

Is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, perhaps the most overrated book on usage ever written, riddled with errors, hypocrisy, vacuous advice, and fatuous platitudes?

I do some investigation and I have determined that the dictionary entries returned by the Google define: operator are from the New Oxford American Dictionary, including the pronunciation symbols. Oxford Dictionary. http://www.oxforddictionaries.org With a free search. com site has a complete key to these pronunciations.

How do I find out which system on Wikipedia matches Google search for pronunciation respelling for my word? Is its the NOAD scheme for the New Oxford American Dictionary?

Furthermore, once I made this determination, I was reminded that the Dictionary app which comes with Mac OS X also got its data from the New Oxford American Dictionary, and I found that this was indeed the case—the definition content matches exactly.

Wikipedia article on Google Dictionary reports that the content is from Oxford American College Dictionary. Is the content, including pronunciations, from the American English department of Oxford Dictionaries?

The Corpus of Contemporary American English is the top 3 collocates for juxtaposed with’s

  most common with juxtaposed to and juxtaposed against about 1/4 as common.  

My personal preference is juxtaposed against… To

say… My preference is is juxtaposed against… to say that my preference is balanced…. one level. One level in my personality is more balanced… My personal preference is juxtaposed towards.

People are interested. topics are interesting. interesting.

questions are open. people are interested in topics. interesting, topics. topics.

Yes, it does happen to everyone, but it is about each. It is called remorse. An apology. What is the remorse of the buyer or the seller? My question is “C to be answered (a)”?

What do people think of Wikipedia? The Corpus of Contemporary American English gives 36 examples of “buyer’s remorse”, but “buyer remorse” has just 1, and there are no results for either “buyers’ remorse” or “buyers’ remorse”. In

this case no examples exist, the “Columbian Dictionary of English” is a copy.

The word lost is the past participle of the verb lose. In the sentence “Your app may simply get lost” the verb phrase is “may simply get lost” where “get lost” is a verb structure known as a get -passive. It is a form of the passive voice that uses the verb get. Whereas the usual passive voice uses the verb be. (See this related question ).

The second sentence “Your App may simply lost” is ungrammatical. The auxiliary verb may require attachment to an infinitive verb phrase, and lost is a bare participle, so it cannot be used in that position.

(Note This answer was posted to a question which has since been deleted on Programmers.Stackexchange.nyr). com)

The abbreviated form char, short for character, can be pronounced in several different ways in American English: /t r/ char as in car : /kr/ char as in acter: /kr/ char as in care:/kr/ For

1. many speakers of American English (including
2. myself) the // sound before /r/
3. is merged with the // sound.

The words marry and merry are pronounced the same. For these people, #3 and #4 are indistinguishably pronounced like #4. People with this merger are often confused if someone else tries to explain the distinction between #3 and #4.

I have heard all these forms used and as a descriptivist, I would make no attempt to declare them as “correct”. Each argument has some arguments for and against each argument I will enumerate below.

1. This form has the advantage of being “obvious”—that is, it is pronounced the way a nave pronunciation of unknown English word would be pronounced. How was the unrelated, but identically spelled, verb char pronounced? Outcomes:: On the downside swiss abbreviation preserves neither the initial /k/ sound nor the vowel of the word the abbreviation is derived from, character.
2. This form retains the initial /k/ sound but is otherwise pronounced as spelled. How do letter break vowels from other character sets?
3. What is included in the form STUDIUM? both the initial /K/ and the vowel from character! With exact accuracy, it is the most faithful to the source word. On the downside, /r/ is not a phonotactically valid way for a word to end. The sequence /r/ is only possible if there are additional vowels, as in marry or character. If you say kr (as an independent word) is a violation of the normal phonotactic constraints of spoken English. Why character is short for character?
4. It is very similar to #4, being quite faithful to the underlying form, but with the advantage of not violating the phonotactic constraint against words ending in /r/. When this form is used, they are still using it. For people with the marry — Merry merger, it is not actually perceived to be different at all from #3 at all. char is short for character and how character is pronounced. On the downside, it is a completely non-obvious pronunciation if you don’t already know to do this. If you were to distinguish any of the three vowels in 4, #4 and #3, #4 would not be the same vowel.

Define different forms of pronunciation? A dialectical difference can lead to a more natural, more accurate pronunciation of char if two people are talking about dialectical differences, even though they are not talking about dialectical differences.

Why is Jewish hateful?

Jewess is more offensive due to associations with anti-Semitism, and it is even more sexist on top of that.

As @Monica Cellio said in a comment elsewhere here:

Jewess and poetess are offensive because they move the emphasis from the thing being talked about (Jewishness, poetry) to “ess”, as if women are in a different class than men. Men are poets, men are Jews, if you want to avoid giving offense Both Jew

and Jewess are fairly “loaded” terms and are likely to cause offense. Why are we a non-Jew avoiding the term “Jewish” and “Jewish”? In terms of offensiveness, the Jew is approximately the same as a Jewss. As a Jewish person can a word Jew refer to a specific person in the alphabet, you can use it very gently. Which is more important to me than or because I don’t convey any sense of us vs them. mentality? What does it cost to get away with using Jewess? If you have any doubts about whether you can get away with it, then you can’t; so don’t use it! When I describe, you don’t need me to tell you why I don’t have any such doubts. So if you didn’t know going in to reading this paragraph, then the answer for you is “no, never use the word Jewess “.

Why would a guy watch this 1980 sketch for “jewess jeans”?

Which equation is right: less is to fewer as more is to more?

• More water; less water
• more dogs; less/fewer dogs
• 10 items or more ; 10 items or less/fewer
• one more bell to answer; one less bell to answer
• weighing 100 pounds more ; weighing 100 pounds less
• 500 words or more ; 500 words or less
• or less than 10,000 miles; less than 10,000

miles avoiding obstacles and stopping at point of origin ; 10,000 yards or better ; 10,000 feet or fewer ; weighing a person of zero, less than 500 pounds.