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Can't is a contraction of cannot. 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.
Pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost.
The word "gringo" did not originate during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) as a corruption of "Green, go home!", in reference to the green uniforms of American troops. [96] [97] The word originally simply meant "foreigner", and is probably a corruption of the Spanish word griego for "Greek" (along the lines of the idiom "It's Greek to ...
The post 26 Palindrome Examples: Words and Phrases That Are the Same Backwards and Forwards appeared first on Reader's Digest. Palindrome words are spelled the same backward and forward.
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 ...
Cafe chalkboard advertising a "pre fixed" menu, an eggcorn of the French prix fixe (fixed price). An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, [1] creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context. [2]
Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a task referred to as word-sense disambiguation. The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, and sometimes elaborate on their specific intended meaning (in which case ...
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