Reader Opinions
Virendra – (the ball is in your court) May 19, 2019
Saudi Arabia has said they want to avoid the war but the ball is in the court of Iran, it is upto them to initiate the action to start the war after USA oil embargo on Iran.
Lara – (dark horse) May 18, 2019
The term did originate from horse racing and referred to lighter horses that were dyed a darker colour in order to mask their identity and therefore leverage the betting odds.
Oh My – (show true colors) May 17, 2019
‘Advanced English‘ student is ‘pot calling the kettle black‘. No punctuation, and horribly run-on sentences.
Derek Smith, Scotland – (do or die) May 12, 2019
Dave Johnson thinks that Robert Burns may have “got the phrase” from Tennyson’s poem of 1854, but I don’t think so because Robert Burns died in 1796.
Horse Caretaker – (eat like a horse) May 9, 2019
Whoever wrote the “Origin” above knows nothing about horses, let alone their eating habits. Do not be misled. Horses eat like crazy. That’s where this phrase comes from, idiom, no idiom, or idiot. Not sure which.
Lola Ice – (ring a bell) May 8, 2019
Pavlov NEVER used a bell in his experiments.
He used a metronome among other stimuli.
Manish – (draw the line) May 5, 2019
Drawing line has to be taken as installing a peripheral boundary to withhold something from passing across something.
Solomon David – (beauty is in the eye of the beholder) May 4, 2019
It is equivalent to the saying that “one man’s food is another man’s poison”
MWM age 66 – (not give a damn) May 1, 2019
it’s contracted from ‘I don’t give a tinker’s dam’. A tinker went from town to town mending cooking pots and pans. he would prepare the area around the hole in the pan and then build a wall of dough around the hole. He would then pour molten solder over the hole to mend it. when the solder dried, the residual dough would then be brushed away as useless. thus, not giving a tinker’s dam meant you didin’t care about something so completely worthless.
Anil Singh – (Adverbs) April 28, 2019
1. Sometimes, an adverb/adverbs may be used at the beginning of a sentence to modify the meaning of the sentence as a whole, instead of functioning as the modifier of a verb, adjective or another adverb – as, for example, in this sentence! Other examples:
Unfortunately, they were not at home when we called.
Regrettably, we shall not be able to accede to your request.
Slowly, inexorably, the enemy closed in on the isolated village.
2. Interestingly, a word may LOOK like a preposition but, in fact, function as an adverb: consider “in” after ‘closed in’ in the last example in (1) above; “in” is an adverb modifying ‘closed’, whereas ‘on’ is a preposition introducing the phrase “on the isolated village”. Then, again, there’s “Interestingly” at the head of this example …
