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The T–V distinction is a common example in Western languages, while some Asian languages extend this to avoiding pronouns entirely. Some languages have complex politeness systems, such as Korean speech levels and honorific speech in Japanese. Japanese is perhaps the most widely known example of a language that encodes politeness at its core ...
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. [1] [2] [3] It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events (or the intervals between them), and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the ...
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.
Lexicographers gather samples of written instances where a word is used and analyze them to determine patterns of regional or social usage as well as meaning. A word, for example the English word "donny" (a round rock about the size of a man's head), may be only a rare regional usage, or a word may be used worldwide by standard English speakers ...
An idiom is an expression that has a figurative meaning often related, but different from the literal meaning of the phrase. Example: You should keep your eye out for him. A pun is an expression intended for a humorous or rhetorical effect by exploiting different meanings of words. Example: I wondered why the ball was getting bigger. Then it ...
Colored People's Time was used as the name of a 1960s public interest program produced by Detroit Public Television. It was also used in the title of the 1983 play, "Colored People's Time: A History Play," written by Leslie Lee , which consisted of 13 fictional vignettes of African American history , from the Civil War through Civil Rights and ...
The speed of light in vacuum provides a convenient universal relationship between distance and time, so in physics (particularly in quantum physics) and often in chemistry, a jiffy is defined as the time taken for light to travel some specified distance.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).