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Cant has a number of different meanings, including a slope or slant, or a kind of slang or jargon spoken by a particular group of people. "Canting arms" is a coat-of-arms that represents meaning of the bearer's surname. Standard: I can't understand the dialogue in this book because it is written in cant. Standard: Heralds do not pun; they cant ...
Sue has been to the beach. (as above; Sue went to the beach at some time before now) Sue has been on the beach. (use of been simply as part of be; she spent time on the beach) The sentences above with the present perfect can be further compared with alternatives using the simple past, such as: My father went to Japan.
It has been so for centuries, and even the most conservative grammarians have followed this practice. [ 16 ] [c] Regarding the word "and", Fowler's Modern English Usage states, "There is a persistent belief that it is improper to begin a sentence with And , but this prohibition has been cheerfully ignored by standard authors from Anglo-Saxon ...
The development of ain't for the various forms of be, have, will and do occurred independently, at different times. The use of ain't for the forms of be was established by the mid-18th century and for the forms of have by the early 19th century. The use of ain't is a continuing subject of controversy in English.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage and writing. It covers a wide range of topics that relate to usage, including: plurals, nouns, verbs, punctuation, cases, parentheses, quotation marks, the use of foreign terms, and so on.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
The Oxford use of ‑ize does not extend to the spelling of words not traced to the Greek ‑izo, ‑izein suffixes. One group of such words is those ending in ‑lyse , such as analyse , paralyse and catalyse , which come from the Greek verb λύω , lyo , the perfective (aorist) stem of which is ‑lys- : for these, ‑lyse is the more ...
Follett's Modern American Usage is the book published with the title Modern American Usage which was left in draft form and unfinished by Wilson Follett at his death. It was completed and edited by his friend Jacques Barzun in collaboration with six other editors. It is a usage guide for contemporary American English.