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to clear (as tables) in a restaurant; to work as a busboy: butcher (have a butcher's) to have a look (rhyming slang: butcher's hook=look) to kill and cut up an animal for meat to kill messily, or someone who does so one who cuts and sells meat to make a big mess of things; botch ("butcher it up"; "I butchered the spelling") butchery (n.)
Unlike some other languages, English also allows passive clauses in which an indirect object, rather than a direct object, is promoted to the subject. For example: John gave Mary a book. → Mary was given a book (by John). In the active form, gave is the verb; John is its subject, Mary its indirect object, and a book its direct object. In the ...
The Elements of Style (also called Strunk & White) is a style guide for formal grammar used in American English writing. The first publishing was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a ...
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 word "inflammable" can be derived by two different constructions, both following standard rules of English grammar: appending the suffix -able to the word inflame creates a word meaning "able to be inflamed", while adding the prefix in-to the word flammable creates a word meaning "not flammable".
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
Professor Whitney in his Essentials of English Grammar recommends the German original stating "there is an English version, but it is hardly to be used." (p. vi) Meyer-Myklestad, J. (1967). An Advanced English Grammar for Students and Teachers. Universitetsforlaget-Oslo. p. 627. Morenberg, Max (2002). Doing Grammar, 3rd edition. New York ...
A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar. [3] Aarts, F. G. A. M. (April 1988). "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language: The great tradition ...