Wordwizard

For a few weeks now, I have been hearing Boris Johnson talking about a "guacamole strategy" for dealing with localized outbreaks. It has always puzzled me, as has his bizarre pronunciation. So today I bothered to try to find out why "guacamole". Turns out it is a "whack a mole strategy", which is on...

The image below shows all the designs for the infamous Mexican border wall. Your picture appears similar to design no. 8, where the elements are called "columns", but I would probably just say "posts" or something similar. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/17482/production/_105226359_trump...

On the other hand, I suspect that 2 and 4 are far more widespread in spoken English than 1 and 3...

Your example "Gillespie, exercising a monarch's noblesse oblige, also appeared, unbilled, at ‘Bebop, Forty and Under", for example, sounds totally alien to my ears. And your 2019 citation grates very badly for me. I only know the expression as a sort of standalone tag. Something like "I have to go t...

Thanks for that, Ken. It is odd to me that you find the phrasal usage less important. For my part, I have never in my life heard the use as a noun. I only know the phrasal use.

There is something about "didn't use to" that seems very wrong to me when I see it written, but it is perfectly correct and is in widespread spoken use. It's just something that irks me a little. Strange that, as I am usually very tolerant! For me, all the sentences are fine. I regard the idiom "use...

I was talking to a friend about rhyme, and he asked whether there was a word for a rhyme that occurs within a line of poetry and not at the end of the line. "Internal rhyme", I said. "Oh, is that all?", he said. It occurred to me that there should be a word for the obsessive fixation that there has ...

Yes, Trolley, "I ain't gonna lie" has also become widespread this side of the pond. It seems to me that it's used to preface something that the speaker knows is pretty outrageous and socially unacceptable: "I ain't gonna lie; I don't trust pikeys". And yes, Erik. "Just sayin'..." is a really unpleas...

Very good question, Steven. And not entirely easy to answer. The short answer is yes. You can use the phrase without a negative undertone. The longer answer is rather more complicated. We tend to use "in all honesty" when we know that what we want to say will be difficult for the hearer, and we are ...

Generally, I would probably say a "toilet freshener". The ones you show could be described as "in-cistern toilet blocks".

Actually, I would guess that that was not machine translated. Nowadays, machines are really quite good and are already making the market very difficult for us. I guess it was written by a human with a dictionary and a couple of English lessons.

The word that springs to my mind is "drowsy". It is also possible to use the word "soporific" in this sense, but it is not common.

Your online sources are correct. The business jargon, which has been around for a while now, refers to the induction (which was a perfectly good word) of new employees. I suspect that the speaker in your conference call incorrectly assumed a wider meaning. I certainly don't know it in relation to ne...

Ships are large vessels defined primarily in terms of their size, and secondarily by the fact that they are mostly seagoing vessels rather than freshwater craft. Unless they are submarines in the Royal Navy, in which case they are always "boats". While Erik's explanation generally holds true, many ...

In the Alps, particularly in Italy, some rock faces have been opened up for tourists who do not have the skills or courage to actually climb the rock faces. These routes are made up of ladders and steel cables that you can use to clip yourself in using a harness. Such a route is known in Italian and...