Re: correct English usage
On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Kelly Clowers wrote:
They are not wrong per say, but only the first definition you mention
(anatomy) is in widespread use these days (which is why it said
"chiefly").
Is that specific to American English, or is it also true for
British English, Canadian English, ...?
Paul's statement was much more stronger:
this is the wrong word in English to describe the relation between
Squeeze and Lenny. Maybe OK in some other European language, but not in
English.
If you say "posterior" people's first thought will be "ass".
but in the given sentence, posterior is clearly an adjective?
That happens all the time with dictionary-based translations, by
the way. It can be very hard to tell if a definition is really used
much in practice.
Then, for people whose native language is not English, in some cases
the only way to find the right word seems to be try and error.
Note that the WordReference English Thesaurus © 2012 gave the most common
meaning for posterior in second place, and that it was nowhere mentioned that
the time related meaning was deprecated. Is there a dictionnary where this
kind of information would be available?
In general there is a tendency in modern American English to
use rather simple words or descriptive phrases made of simple
words rather than a single very precise but less well known word.
Again, is that specific to American English?
--
Pierre Frenkiel
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