Help with English

Most high-class Chinese restaurants in the USA serve a dish that they call Peking duck. I'm sure it's nothing like the version you can order in Bei Jing. ("Pe King" is the Cantonese/Guang Dong hua pronunciation.)

You generally will not find roast turkey on the menu in a restaurant. They serve turkey sandwiches, which are not expensive because turkey is cheaper than beef. (I make my own dog food because one of my dogs can't eat grains, and I feed him turkey because it's cheap.) At Thanksgiving and Christmas most restaurants are closed because most people eat at home with their families. The big hotels may serve a fancy dinner laid out like a banquet; you serve yourself from big platters.

All birds lay eggs. That's where baby birds come from.

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I don't see why not, but nobody does it. No one sells turkey eggs for food.

Apparently not, or we'd be eating them. Chickens have been selectively bred in captivity for thousands of generations, to lay one egg every day, and to make those eggs perfect for breakfast.

Turkeys were unknown until the Europeans discovered North America. They mistakenly assumed that they were a type of guinea fowl, which was also known as "Turkey fowl" because they were originally imported into Europe through Turkey. So they called them "turkeys." Many of the animals in the New World were misnamed this way, such as the American bison (almost always called a "buffalo"), the skunk (often referred to as a "polecat," which is a type of weasel), and the cougar (often called a "mountain lion" although it is more closely related to the house cat).

This refers to the awkwardness that families experience after two members get a divorce.

• Will Ricardo's and Suzy's children come to Ricardo's house for Thanksgiving dinner, or Suzy's house?
• If they come with us to Ricardo's house, do we have to make sure we don't seat them next to Ricardo's brother so he doesn't start a big argument?
• I never liked Ricardo and I thought Suzy was an idiot for marrying him. I will not have dinner with his family.

This is hell for families.

The silent, seething kind of anger or hostility. Rather than talking about it, they withdraw.

These days, the standard way for younger people to withdraw is to put on headphones or earbuds and listen to loud music so no one can talk to them.

Two people will quarrel quietly between themselves, pretending that no one can hear them so they're not making everybody uncomfortable. If you clench your teeth and whisper loudly, it sounds like hissing.

That's just an example of a hissed quarrel (or a "hissy fit" as we call it if one person is doing most of the hissing). It's sarcastic, pretending that the other person doesn't already know that you grew up here and know where all the nearby businesses are.

I had that happen to me once. The lady I was with brought a "friend" along but apparently he thought he was more than a friend. She sat in front with me and he was in the back seat. We were talking about stuff that he apparently didn't understand (classical music). When I stopped for a red light, he opened the left-hand door (we drive on the right in the USA) and stepped out into the middle of the road with all the stopped traffic, and walked home.

We now protect children so carefully that we've taken all the fun out of their lives. Instead of sitting in their Momma's lap enjoying the ride, they're lashed into a container in the back seat where they can't see anything and nobody can see them.

Americans are living longer and, at least in some cases, healthier. But our vision tends to deteriorate as we get older. My mother-in-law was still driving her car at age 90. When her neighbor saw her getting into the car she called everyone else in the neighborhood and told them to collect their children and their pets and lock them safely inside their houses.

Tryptophan is one of the essential amino acids. It is a component of the protein in animal flesh (as well as eggs and cheese, for people who don't like to kill animals for food) and in some plant protein such as soybeans. It is called "essential" because our bodies do not have the ability to synthesize it from other amino acids, we have to eat it directly.

Some people consider tryptophan to be a sleep aid, although the scientific evidence for this is weak. These same people tell us that turkey meat is high in tryptophan, and this is why people tend to fall asleep after Thanksgiving dinner. In fact turkey does not have more tryptophan than any other meat, and in any case it's not enough to cause drowsiness. People fall asleep after a holiday meal because of its high carbohydrate content: potatoes, yams, cranberries, cornbread, Waldorf fruit salad, etc. Carbohydrates stimulate the body's production of insulin. Insulin starts a long chain reaction that ultimately results in the synthesis of melatonin, a chemical that promotes sleep.

Just a bunch of silly words to describe a group of people who are arguing and yelling.

"The above sounds like very weird English." It's just very informal, colloquial speech. We don't usually write this way. But when we're trying to capture the feeling of a particular kind of gathering, then transcribing the dialog accurately helps the readers understand how the people felt at the time.

 

I doubt it. It's obviously a silly made-up name, since a penny is a form of money. The James Bond movies used to have a large component of humor and silliness. They've lost that in the recent films, making them much darker and angrier.

Do they not have Wikipedia where you live? All famous people are listed there. Adele's full name is Adele Laurie Blue Adkins.

Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson. She took her uncle's surname "Perry."

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone.

She made that up. Her real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

Robyn Rihanna Fenty, from Barbados.

Avril Ramona Lavigne. She's French-Canadian; that's not the common Jewish surname "Levine."

Taylor Alison Swift. She's from Pennsylvania, moved to Nashville to launch a career in country/western music, but if you ask me I don't think she's very country.

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. Her mother's name was Beyoncé, a Louisiana Creole with both French and African ancestry.

Britney Jean Spears. Yes, "Britney" seems to be a corrupted spelling of "Brittany," the region in France whose people speak the Celtic language Breton.

Christina María Aguilera. Her father is from Ecuador. I doubt that she was taught Spanish at home because her pronunciation is not good.

Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll. She was born in Colombia but her father is from Lebanon. (By the standard Spanish naming convention, her father's surname Mebarek comes first, followed by her mother's surname Ripoll, which appears to be Catalan, not Spanish.) She sings in Spanish, Arabic and English, and usually belly-dances during her concerts. I saw her in Philadelphia in 2002. I think every Colombian in America was there, screaming and waving Colombian flags. The entire concert was in Spanish except for the stupid Aerosmith song "Dude Looks Like A Lady." She did a lot of belly-dancing, especially during her monster hit Ojos Así ("Eyes Like Yours") which has both Spanish and Arabic lyrics and some Mideastern instruments. She brought a mariachi band (a happy, type or traditional Mexican folk music using trumpets and accordions as well as fiddles, guitars, and the guitarrón, a gigantic fretless acoustic bass guitar) on stage for her big crossover hit Ciega, Sordomuda ("Blind, Deaf-mute" or "deaf, dumb and blind" as we usually say it so insultingly in English) that introduced her to the Mexican music market, which was then automatically played on the Spanish-language radio stations in Los Angeles, where it was noticed by the Hollywood music industry. Next thing we knew, she dyed her hair blonde, lost waaaay too much weight, and started singing stupid forgettable ditties in English. Pretty much the same thing Hollywood did to Céline Dion, who used to sing lovely French songs.

Because it's a French name. Without the accent ague that E would be silent, "bay-YAWNS." This way it's bay-yawn-SAY. Although we usually say the first syllable as BEE, not BAY--we speak French horribly in America.

In French the digraph GN is pronounced like Ñ in Spanish: NY. The E is silent, so it's lah-VEEN with a tiny "yuh" at the end: ah-VREEL lah-VEEN(y).

 

It is universal practice in all English-speaking countries that the family name comes last. I have told you before that in English, the term last name always means "surname," for the obvious reason that the surname always comes last. If you remember that, you won't have any problem.

Even our laws and our computers follow this practice. If your name is John Esteban Mikhail Roosevelt Smith, every directory, every roster, every membership list and every digital database in America, Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand will alphabetize you under Smith because even though you have five names, Smith is your last name!

We make exceptions to this rule only for non-English names using a very small set of prepositions that are so common that we all recognize them. I think the entire set is:

• Ben (Hebrew)
• Bin (Arabic)
• Da (Portuguese)
• De (French, Spanish, Portuguese)
• Della (Italian)
• Di (Italian)
• Du (French)
• Van (Dutch)
• Von (German)

All of these prepositions may appear with the first letter capitalized or in lower case.

So Osama bin Laden, Vasco Da Gama, Ani Di Franco, Daphne du Maurier, Martin Van Buren and Wernher von Braun are recognized as having two-word last names, alphabetized under B, D, D, D, V, and V, respectively. Yes, it's a nightmare for computer programmers.

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Many Americans, especially women, combine their own surname with their spouse's surname. We do not have a special rule for these names, it's up to them to decide whether they want to be known by their name or their husband's/wife's. The hyphen is used to make the difference:

• The last name (or surname) of Jane Smith Brown is Brown, and she is alphabetized under B.
• The last name of Mary Rogers-Kennedy is Rogers-Kennedy, and she is alphabetized under R. The hyphen makes "Rogers-Kennedy" into one word.

The second half of your question is just as easy to answer as the first half, if you just remember to use the common terms "first name" and "last name" instead of the fancy terms "given name" and "family name." Our "given name" always comes first and our "family name" always comes last.

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins: her first name ("given name") is Adele and her last name ("family name") is Adkins. She has two middle names, Laurie and Blue, which are subordinate to the others, and would only be used on formal records. She is so famous and popular that even people who don't know her personally just call her "Adele" without using her family name. (The same is true of Madonna.) In a formal context she will be called "Miss Adkins." (Or "Ms.", which is pronounced "Miz," a deliberately ambiguous title, recently invented, so as not to disclose whether a woman is married.)

Middle names are also "given" by our parents. Sometimes for formal reasons such as to honor an ancestor, sometimes for more practical reasons, for example because your name is so common that five people in your school have it. John Smith is the most common male name in the English-speaking world, so he'll probably be known as John David or whatever his middle name is. Let's hope it's not Pendergast.

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Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter: She has a hyphenated last name ("family name") so she has only three names, which is typical in our countries. Her friends (and her fans) call her Beyoncé; in formal situations she would be called Miss (or Ms.) Knowles-Carter.

Okay, now we're dealing with a name from a country whose people speak Spanish, not English. The rules are different there. Each child is given both his father's surname and his mother's surname. In this case Shakira's Lebanese father has the Arabic surname Mebarek, and her Colombian mother has the Catalan surname Ripoll. Note that the father's surname always comes first. This is treated as a compound-name, even though it doesn't use a hyphen. In casual speech people refer to each other using only their father's name, not the whole compound.

The government agencies and the computer programmers in Spanish-speaking countries know this, so her name will be alphabetized under M. However, when these people come to live in the USA or another anglophone country, our computers don't work that way. So in America she is known only as Shakira Isabel Mebarek. We can't possibly program our computers to recognize foreign names AND know the rules for sorting them! If Chinese premiere Li Ke Qiang decides to emigrate to the USA, he will have to change his name to Ke Qiang Li or we and our computers will assume that his family name is Qiang and his given name is Li.

If someone from Europe named Hilda Schmidt Gómez comes here, how will we know whether she's from Spain and had a German father and uses the surname Schmidt, or she was born in Germany to a Spanish father and took her German mother's family name as a middle name? We don't know. She will be known by the surname Gómez.

BTW, in Spanish-speaking countries, children only inherit the first half of their parents' surnames: their father's father's name and their mother's father's name. Mother's names are lost after one generation. If Colombian singer Shakira Mebarek Ripoll marries Colombian Nobel-prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez (he's old enough to be her grandfather but they are good friends, so it could happen

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) their son would be named Juan García Mebarek.

That's very common in our countries. I have the same first name as my father. We are distinguished by having different middle names. Men often name their first-born son after themselves. It's not so common for women, but it does happen, as with Beyoncé. Sometimes they even use the same middle name, which is very confusing.

Nicknames are used almost universally in the USA so this isn't as big a problem as you might think. People called my father Fraggy and they call me Frag. (Obviously I made that up for the sake of the example, but our true names are just like that.)

I know that you have a much different tradition. All of the children of a Chinese couple have the same "given name" (their second name) as an identifier of their generation. Then each one is given a unique name (their third name) to identify the individual. And of course the family name comes first, as in all countries that were influenced by Chinese civilization, including Japan, Korea, Vietnam and probably others. Your culture is much more traditional than ours. Your children's "generation-name" was chosen and written down in a book by your great-great grandparents!

"On" is correct. You can use "over" in a less specific context, such as "John and I discussed the plans for expanding our business over the phone, but we have not drawn up the paperwork yet." You can also say, "I will contact you by phone the day before I arrive." (Notice that there is no the in this construction. Learning how to use the definite article correctly in our language is very important!) We never say "in the phone" unless we mean the device itself: "The police know about our plan to rob the bank. They must have planted a bug in my phone."

 

"Boot up" or simply "boot" with no preposition at all. "Boot into" is wrong.

And we don't usually bother saying "Windows operating system" since these days everybody knows you mean your operating system, not the windows on your house. We just say, "I can't boot Windows." Or more likely, "Windows won't boot," because we (very correctly!) lay the blame on the stupid unreliable software (or perhaps the stupid unreliable hardware), not on ourselves. All we did was push a button and it's very difficult to do that wrong!

An opportunity with which I have been blessed. "Of which" and "by which" are wrong. The editor should have caught this, unless perhaps he wanted to deliberately make the guy look like a poor communicator. That is extremely poor English!

You are blessed with love, health, prosperity, peace, happiness, etc. You are blessed by your god, or the fates, or just plain old good luck.

 

It's French. The literal meaning is "superior force." In English it's a term used by lawyers. It refers to an unexpected yet powerful event that renders one party to a contract incapable of fulfilling his responsibilities under the contract. A judge may rule that, under these exceptional circumstances, he is excused from the conditions of the contract.

There are so many errors in that sentence. Let's start with phonetics: "usual" is pronounced "YOO-zhoo-ul," which means it begins with the consonant Y. Therefore we say "a usual...", not "an usual...".

Second, force majeure is two words, not one word. So your question is: "Are these words...?" If there were a hyphen in the middle instead of a space, then we might count it as one word; we're not consistent about that.

Since it's in a foreign language and therefore is probably an idiom, it might be better to refer to it as a phrase: "Is this phrase...?" Or simply "Is this idiom...?"

Finally, I think what you were trying to ask is "Is this standard English or common English or good English. "English" is not a countable noun: we never talk about "two Englishes." Therefore it never takes an indefinite article: "English," not "an English."

So your question becomes: "Is this phrase common English?" You could also just say, "Is this common English," since it's obvious what you're referring to.

No. To unite two things means to join them together in some important way, such as politics or religion, while they remain two distinct things. The United States, for example, are still fifty distinct states, each with their own state government and state laws, even though they are subject to the laws of the country.

To unify two things means to turn them into one a single thing. The Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany") and the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany") were unified after Perestroika (the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact). There is now only one country, Germany.

The only Chinese surname I know that contains two syllables is Soo Hoo. We only know the Guang Dong/Cantonese pronunciation, since until recently almost all of the Chinese people in the USA spoke Guang Dong hua. If I'm not mistaken, I think the Guo Yu/Mandarin pronunciation is something like Si Tu.

Isn't that because there is a formal system for names? The second half of the given name is chosen by the parents, but the first half is shared by everyone of that generation, and was written down in a book 100 years ago, right? Today many Chinese don't have a second given name because they have no brothers or sisters.

 

Yes. This is why I call prepositions "noise words." They mean almost nothing, and in many cases there are several different ones that serve the same purpose.

As I've said before, the only real value of English prepositions is that they allow us to easily identify foreign speakers.

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Caveat emptor is Latin for "let the buyer beware," and was originally established as a legal principle long ago in England, in the days before statutory law became established so common law was all they had. Common law required people to be honest. Therefore a person who was selling something would be prosecuted for lying about its quality or its suitability for its ordinary, intended purpose--for example a bucket that could not hold water or a mule that could not pull a wagon.

But if he didn't actually lie, but simply let the buyer assume that any bucket can hold water and any mule can pull a cart, it was very difficult to prosecute the seller. The buyer was assumed to be intelligent and observant, so common law gave the buyer the responsibility to beware of false claims.

Today we have an enormous code of law comprised of statutes. But the principle of caveat emptor still stands. In the USA the main exception is the purchase of a brand-new house directly from the builder: the law gives you an implied warranty of fitness. If there's something wrong with the house, the builder has to fix it or else give you back your money and keep the house.

But in most other transactions there is no government protection. If you buy something and it turns out to be crap, you're a loser.

Of course corporations don't get rich by cheating their customers, so today almost everything you buy (in the USA, the U.K., and probably most of the Western countries) comes with an explicit warranty from the manufacturer and/or from the store that sells it to you. Sears-Roebuck, Costco, Walmart, Safeway, McDonalds, virtually every corporation that has more than one store posts a warranty on the wall that you read when you enter, promising that if you are dissatisfied with your purchase for any reason, even if you just change your mind and decide that you don't like the taste of peanut butter or that a red shirt doesn't look good on you, they will take it back and refund your money immediately.

Major exceptions include vehicles. If you don't like your new Chevrolet because it's uncomfortable, too slow, or uses too much fuel, that's your problem. If it doesn't run well, the dealer will fix it, but he won't take it back and give you a refund.

You'll probably have the same trouble with an appliance or an electronic device. If your new refrigerator or TV works okay but you decide you don't like it, you probably won't be able to return it. The term buyer's remorse has been coined for a person who wishes he had been more sensible and not spent all that money--or maybe the thing is a little too big for his house--or perhaps he realizes that he'll never have time to use it--or possibly it's a wife or husband who doesn't approve of the extravagance--or it might be a landlord who doesn't want a big heavy pool table in his upstairs apartment with its flimsy floor.

Yes. It's a somewhat formal word. Writers have to use a larger vocabulary than we use in speech, to make sure we don't use the same word over and over. There's an even more unusual word, "howbeit," that means the same thing. I used it once when I was desperate.