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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 ...
An opinion piece excerpted from his book Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Grammar Puss Archived 2014-04-30 at the Wayback Machine, by Steven Pinker (1994). Argues against prescriptive rules. A revised draft of this article became the chapter "The Language Mavens" in The Language Instinct
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
"Bull", meaning nonsense, dates from the 17th century, while the term "bullshit" has been used as early as 1915 in British [8] and American [9] slang and came into popular usage only during World War II. The word "bull" itself may have derived from the Old French bole, meaning "fraud, deceit". [9] The term "horseshit" is a near synonym.
While targeting "English language students and researchers" (p. 45), an abridged version of the grammar was released in 2002, Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, together with a workbook entitled Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English Workbook, to be used by students on university and teacher-training courses.
Rudolph Carnap defined the meaning of the adjective formal in 1934 as follows: "A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for example, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are ...
The adverb well may be used in colloquial BrE only with the meaning "very" to modify adjectives. For example, "The film was well good." [37] In both British and American English, a person can make a decision; however, only in British English is the common variant take a decision also an option in a formal, serious, or official context. [38]
A formal grammar is a rigorous finitary definition of a formal language, where the language is understood as an in general infinite set of strings over an alphabet. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form.