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English interjections are a category of English words – such as yeah, ouch, Jesus, oh, mercy, yuck, etc. – whose defining features are the infrequency with which they combine with other words to form phrases, their loose connection to other elements in clauses, and their tendency to express emotive meaning. These features separate English ...
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Examples are "gooses" instead of "geese" in child speech and replacement of the Middle English plural form for "cow", "kine", with "cows". [1] Regularization is a common process in natural languages ; regularized forms can replace irregular ones (such as with "cows" and "kine") or coexist with them (such as with " formulae " and " formulas " or ...
A fresh cow is a dairy term for a cow (or a first-calf heifer in few regions) who has recently given birth, or "freshened." The adjective applying to cattle in general is usually bovine. The terms bull, cow and calf are also used by extension to denote the sex or age of other large animals, including whales, hippopotamus, camels, elk and elephants.
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).
Words with specific British English meanings that have different meanings in American and/or additional meanings common to both languages (e.g. pants, cot) are to be found at List of words having different meanings in American and British English. When such words are herein used or referenced, they are marked with the flag [DM] (different meaning).
The phrase "down bad" has taken on a life of its own on social media. People seem to be using it in a myriad of ways, but the spirit of the term is to yearn. Urban Dictionary defines "down bad" as ...
An opinion piece excerpted from his book Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Grammar Puss Archived 2014-04-30 at the Wayback Machine, by Steven Pinker (1994). Argues against prescriptive rules. A revised draft of this article became the chapter "The Language Mavens" in The Language Instinct