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Outside DoD, other parts of the U.S. government advise against using the word shall for three reasons: it lacks a single clear meaning, it causes litigation, and it is nearly absent from ordinary speech. The legal reference Words and Phrases dedicates 76 pages to summarizing hundreds of lawsuits that centered around the meaning of the word shall.
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
Modal auxiliary verbs, such as the English words may, can, must, ought, will, shall, need, dare, might, could, would, and should, are often used to express modality, especially in the Germanic languages. Ability, desirability, permission, obligation, and probability can all be exemplified by the usage of auxiliary modal verbs in English:
As for shall vs should, my (northwestern US) ears prefer shall but the difference is very slight. Shall focuses on your magnimony, and you may already be half-standing when you say it. Should focuses on your social obligation, and you may have no intention of opening the window unless the other person says "yes". --Sluggoster 09:28, 5 November ...
The associated grammatical category is degree of comparison. [1] The usual degrees of comparison are the positive , which simply denotes a property (as with the English words big and fully ); the comparative , which indicates great er degree (as bigger and more fully ); and the superlative , which indicates great est degree (as biggest and most ...
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
Document comparison, also known as redlining or blacklining, is a computer process by which changes are identified between two versions of the same document for the purposes of document editing and review. Document comparison is a common task in the legal and financial industries.
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put ...