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Suit is a noun meaning an article of clothing; it is also a verb meaning to make/be appropriate. Suite is a noun meaning a set of things forming a series or set. [109] Standard: He got dressed in his new suit. Standard: Before leaving the hotel suite, she checked her lipstick in the mirror. Non-standard: That wall color will suite our apartment ...
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 ...
balls-up (vulgar, though possibly not in origin) error, mistake, SNAFU. See also cock-up. (US: fuck up, screw up, mess up) BAME refers to people who are not white; acronym of "black, Asian, and minority ethnic" [18] [19] (US: BIPOC) bank holiday a statutory holiday when banks and most businesses are closed [20] (national holiday; state holiday ...
Sophists – considered the first professional teachers of oratory and rhetoric (ancient Greece 4th century BC). Spin – the act of competing to infuse meaning into agenda items for chosen audiences. Spoonerism – the deliberate or involuntary switching of sounds or morphemes between two words of a phrase, rendering a new meaning.
Which of us could stand up to a similar level of linguistic scrutiny?". [ 6 ] In 2010, Philip Hensher called Bush's apparent coinage of the term "misunderestimated" one of his "most memorable additions to the language, and an incidentally expressive one: it may be that we rather needed a word for 'to underestimate by mistake'."
SNAFU is widely used to stand for the sarcastic expression Situation Normal: All Fucked Up, as a well-known example of military acronym slang. However, the military acronym originally stood for "Status Nominal: All Fucked Up." It is sometimes bowdlerized to all fouled up or similar. [4]
He was then asked for his date of birth, and tripped over his words again. At first, he said “seven seven,” before correcting himself and saying “77”.
When the prefix "re-" is added to a monosyllabic word, the word gains currency both as a noun and as a verb. Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or ...