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eager or intent on, example: he is keen to get to work on time. desirable or just right, example: "peachy keen" – "That's a pretty keen outfit you're wearing." (slang going out of common usage) keeper a curator or a goalkeeper: one that keeps (as a gamekeeper or a warden) a type of play in American football ("Quarterback keeper")
An example of spoonerism on a protest placard in London, England: "Buck Frexit" instead of "Fuck Brexit". A spoonerism is an occurrence of speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see metathesis) between two words of a phrase.
The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that automatically produces "close imitations" of postmodernist writing. It was written in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. [1] A free version is also hosted online.
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 ...
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar , orthography , and word-use , especially between different English-speaking countries.
For example, although unbelievable and irresponsible have identical stress patterns and the first syllable of each is a separate morpheme, the preferred insertion points are different: un-fuckin'-believable, but irre-fuckin'-sponsible. McCarthy explains this by saying they have different prosodic structures: un(be((lieva)ble)) but (irre ...
A discourse marker is a word or a phrase that plays a role in managing the flow and structure of discourse.Since their main function is at the level of discourse (sequences of utterances) rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discourse markers are relatively syntax-independent and usually do not change the truth conditional meaning of the sentence. [1]
Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men"). During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech.