When did the plural form of verbs become obsolete?

[Max Demian]

Why not lever? That's the verb, and leverage is the noun. (I know that there's no noun that can't be verbed.)

[Max Demian]

At University I did a course on "Discrete Mathematics". On hearing of it, an arty fellow student would always reply with "Pssst".

[Davey]

Tooklit? Which European language is that?!

[Max Demian]

If you work in a clothes shop, you might sell a "trouser" or a "pant".

"Bedclothes" aren't clothes worn in bed, they are "nightclothes". You have a "nightdress" or "nightshirt" and even a "nightcap" (which is also a drink). But if you have cold feet, you wear "bedsocks". (It's a shibboleth to tell whether someone is foreign or not.)

[Max Demian]

It's regional. I never pronounce W in an aspirate way. I wouldn't know how.

[Tim Streater]

It's low class books written by the Tooks, of the Shire.

[Paul Herber]

The origin (Anglo-Saxo, Norse) of all these words had the spelling hv... rather than wh...

[Farmer Giles]

Oops!

[polygonum_on_google]

They often get nouns wrong.

"The death of three people."

[Vir Campestris]

I used to work with a guy who'd lived in Germany for several years. And not learned German. My reaction wasn't "Why" but "How".

I too suffered Latin in school (Latin is a language, as dead as dead can be. It killed the Ancient Romans, and now it's killing me). But some sank in. It's useful for church inscriptions, and I was surprised to find myself wandering around Pompeii and reading plaques in Latin with no real trouble. The Italian, OTOH... but I feel I'd have been better off spending the time on a modern language. Say German.

Andy

[RayL12]

I've never been a fan of the name and sound of Arthur. That is until I heard it used when being spoken in ancient dialect. I heard, Art-Ur and Ar-Tur.

[fred]

Many years ago we stopped at a small cafe in Finisterre, Northern Spain. The proprietor managed to tell us he lived in Manchester for a long time and never learnt english as he lived within an Italian community. My sister-in-law married a spaniard (nicknamed Sadam)and ran an English language school yet her husband refused to let her teach her boys english

[Jethro_uk]

My dad had lots of Spanish friends. They tended to converse in a pidgin. Because he had been all over Italy with his national service my Dad picked up a lot of dialect - and conversation in regional Italian dialect is pretty much incomprehensible to Italian speakers. Especially as you go south.

When he moved to the UK he made a point of learning English - to the extent we rarely spoke Italian at home. Which is one reason why I am a little "really ??" when I hear tales of immigrants to the UK that do less. Although that being said from experience I am less credulous than some about people that "can't understand" English. My Dad found people treated him and Mum differently if they assumed he couldn't speak English, so it was a useful deception.

[Brian Howie]

It shows up in Doric. Fit like and furry boot.

[Brian Howie]

Most of the time they mean "Do the arith"

B

[NY]

At my first secondary school, each year was divided into two forms: the A form was supposedly more clever and did Latin and German; the B form did Biology and Ancient History. My parents asked whether there was any way that I could do Biology instead of Latin, and yet remain in the A form to stay with people of my ability. Answer: not possible.

So I endured Latin for six years: four at that school and then another two at the later secondary school after we moved house. The new school was quite happy for me to do biology, but felt that I had missed too much of the syllabus to get up to O level standard in just two years. Grrr.

Latin was by several orders of magnitude the hardest subject I ever did. I had a complete mental block, mainly because the lack of pronouns (I, he), articles (a, the) and prepositions (of, from), coupled with the random word order, meant that I had the greatest difficulty in identifying the nouns and verbs in a sentence - in French and German, you get a lot of help (subconsciously) from those auxiliary words as pointers to "this is an article, so a noun follows; this is a pronoun, so a verb follows", and from a slightly more rigid word order (*). German even gives nouns capital letters, which makes it very easy. I still have no idea how I managed to scrape a C in Latin, when I was expecting to fail it.

I wish I'd done biology: I feel I've missed an important part of life. If Latin had to be taught, it should have been "Latin as the derivation of some English words", not as a grammatical language and not as a history of life in Roman times.

(*) At least French and German tend to group all the words from one clause next to each other, and don't deliberately put the adjective from one clause next tot he noun of the other clause, as was considered "clever" in Latin poetry (the "chi-rhoic construction") - effectively "the blue dog sat on the black car" instead of "the black dog sat on the blue car" - which could only be unpicked if the gender of the two nouns happened to different so it was "obvious" (for some value of "obvious"!) that the adjective and its adjacent noun didn't agree and so had evidently been swapped.

[Max Demian]

You could have learnt it in evening classes. I didn't do any biology at school (as it was an "arts" subject and I was on the science side), but I got O level biology in one year of evening classes, one lesson a week

- I suppose the lessons must have been about two hours a time. Then I got A level biology in two years of evening classes, again one lesson a week. Then I did a biology degree. (I got the other A level subjects through evening classes as well - fortunately I was unemployed most of a time, so had plenty of time for study.)

[NY]

Do you mean the "h" - that's the one that I (as an ignorant non-Scot) usually omit.

My teachers (I started school in the late 60s) tried to drum into us that whales and white were pronounced hwales and hwite - not even w-h-ales and w-hite: the letters were actually pronounced in the *opposite* order. Likewise, suit had an intrusive y sound: syoot.

My great aunt was proud that she spoke correctly. She was from a middle-class Leeds family and her brother and sister (my grandpa and my other great aunt) had a standard educated-northern accent (like Alan Bennett). But Great Aunt May (*never* call her "aunty") had had electrocution (!) lessons. She is the only person who always referred to "lun-shee-on" - not "lun-shun" and definitely not that horrible abbreviation "lunch". Shortly after my parents got married, they were writing Christmas cards and dad happened to write Great Aunt May's card although GAM was

*mum's* aunt. Since he'd be posting her card through her letter box (they lived close by) he addressed it to "Aunty May and Uncle Robert" rather than "Mr. and Mrs. R. Smith" with their postal address. Apparently GAM collared mum in the middle of the grocers and told her that she had evidently married an ignorant peasant who didn't know how to address an envelope properly.

Thinking of conventions that have changed, I have "fond" memories of how to write an address on an envelope:

- two finger-spaces to indent each line from the one above it

- a full stop after every single abbreviation (eg "Mr.", "Mrs." and "R." in the above example)

- a comma after the house number or name. before the street name

- a comma at the end of each line

- a full stop after the county (to show that it's the last line of the address) - or two full stops if it is an abbreviation ("Yorks..")

Mr. and Mrs. R. Smith, 37, Any Street, Any District, Leeds, West Yorks..

And do I do that now? Do I f*ck!

It comes over almost as pedantic and anal as the electronics magazine that I used to get which insisted on putting a full stop after every letter in an initialism or acronym ("r.o.m." rather than "ROM"). I think it did accept "laser" rather than insisting on "l.a.s.e.r." ;-)

[Scott]

I don't think it is consistent. I think you would usually say 'the team is' because they are working together, as I hope the police would be too.