- Idioms or phrases to answer to obvious (yes) questions?
Is the pope catholic? Do vacuum cleaners suck? Is water wet? Is the hypotenuse the longest side of a triangle? Does a bear live in the woods? I’ll answer you with my favorite ‘Y’ word—Yes! Is the sky blue? I totally ‘scored’ getting asked by you Yes! How do you spell yes? Would you take ‘yes’ for an answer? I haven’t said no
- differences - English Language Usage Stack Exchange
Perfect vacuum does not exist - there will always be some energy, some particles manifesting themselves spontaneously from quantum uncertainty, but generally lack of matter, including air is considered vacuum
- pronunciation - Why is vacuum pronounced [ˈvæ. kjuːm] and not [ˈvæ . . .
+1 It seems that vacuum is the odd word out when placed in a lineup with (for example) continuum, individuum, menstruum, and residuum I don't know why the -uum in vacuum came to be pronounced differently from the -uum in the others, but to judge from the pronunciation offered in John Walker's A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language (1807), 'twas not always thus
- Referring to objects as she [duplicate] - English Language Usage . . .
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if a man referred to a vacuum cleaner as "she" even though there is no life-threatening situation or potential harm Likewise, objects with the label "she" are not necessarily unknown to the men involved
- What does programming in a vacuum mean? - English Language Usage . . .
A perfect vacuum would be one with no particles in it at all, which is impossible to achieve in practice Physicists often discuss ideal test results that would occur in a perfect vacuum, which they simply call "vacuum" or "free space", and use the term "partial vacuum" to refer to real vacuum
- Gap, void or vacuum? - English Language Usage Stack Exchange
Considering their primary meanings, vacuum is used more often in a scientific context, in which case it means space completely or partially absent of any matter air It is a scientific term, while void can be used non-technically in a more abstract sense, but it can also be used when talking about empty space in a non-scientific way
- Who changed the way vacumn was spelled 40 years ago?
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, vacuum entered English in the 1540s directly from Latin as the substantivized, neuter form of the adjective vacuus The earliest use was as an abstract, non-count noun denoting the emptiness of space, later any void or empty space, for which one could use the Latin plural vacua or simply tack on
- Curious New Yorker typography - English Language Usage Stack Exchange
That would explain why deadrat's examples of vacuum and zoology are not governed by the style rule Thus, The New Yorker prefers reëducate, reëxamined, coöperation, coördinate, and (perhaps) antiïntellectual to the alternative forms re-educate, re-examined, co-operation, co-ordinate, and anti-intellectual
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