Wordwizard

"Put a cork in it!" and "Put a sock in it!" are both heard.

Neither injunction is particularly polite.

The contributors to Wordwizard are too suffused with radiant gentility to allow such vulgar expressions past their lips.

trolley wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 09, 2020 1:07 am

I should point out that I have been accused, many times, of assuming too much.

I assume that most of us have been accused of that.

Generically, they are trained killers or executioners.

Specifically, they comprise a firing squad.

Experience and observation have both taught me that unsolicited commenting on either attire or general appearance is a minefield. Now I avoid it unless I am absolutely sure it will be well received.

Yes to 1). It is probably the most idiomatic way of expressing this idea. You can tweak 2) in a variety of ways: She {lacks / doesn't have} good taste in clothes. She has poor taste in clothes . Without any context to modify the interpretation of all these variants, they would normally imply that th...

Pipe break might be more formally expressed as pipe breakage.

I think that makes it easier to interpret.

To my mind, pipe break has a sort of limbo existence in which "break" hovers between verb and noun.

No. There is no clue given that you were also fouled, and all the focus in the main sentence is on your anger at Tom being fouled.

The graphic appears to be making fun of the phenomena of helicopter parenting, parental wokeness, together with preoccupations with building up children's self-esteem and the avoidance of harsh punishments and junk food. In other words, it is lampooning the attitudes embedded in present-day bourgeoi...

I too would call them posts. They are too slender and too densely packed to match my conception of a typical column.

It is unlikely to be understood in that way. For that interpretation, "John knows his workplace" would be far preferable.

2) and 4) are not wrong, exactly, but they are rather sloppily phrased. 4) could be parsed (perversely) as meaning that football teams receive support from the entire social class you belong to.

Some interesting wrinkles relating to the word jam are described in this Wikipedia article.

John O’Reilly hoisted his beer and said, "Here's to spending the rest of me life between the legs of me wife!" That won him the top prize at the pub for the night's best toast. He went home and told his wife Mary, "I won the prize for the best toast of the night!" She said, "Aye, did you now? And wh...

Here, it is an emphatic intensifier indicating that what is being described is the opposite of what seems to the speaker to be logical, desirable, or anticipated on the basis of common sense. Tim Kaine is — technically speaking — incorrect. Slavery in the United States was inherited from the days of...

The Wiktionary etymology traces it back to Proto-Indo-European *sámh₂dʰos. That is so far back that it is likely to be impossible to resolve the ultimate origin any further (if there is one).