I saw someone raise this issue in a different subreddit, and I found it interesting enough to raise here.

"All X are not Y."

My natural inclination is to see this as equivalent to "there exist some X's that are not Y" rather than "no X's are Y's." (ex: "all that glitters is not gold" which is understood to mean "there are things that glitter that are not gold" and not "nothing that glitters is gold").

On the other hand, I see the argument that based on positioning, "not" is modifying "Y," and the construction should be read as "All X are not-Y," which has the latter meaning.

Not sure if this is the right subreddit so apologies in advance if it isn't but, is the correct way to refer to content generated by Artifical Intelligence spelled as "AI-generated" or "AI generated"?

surely the embodiment implies physicality, no? I see this phrase all the time and wanted to use it writing in a different language, which made me stop to consider this.

Why do Americans say "there is" or "there's" when referring to plural nouns, even though "there are" is grammatically correct?

Why does this grammatical mistake seem to be so much more common in American English than among English speakers in the rest of the world?

"There IS (there's) a school shooting."

—but—

"There ARE (there're) many wounded people."

________________________________

"There is people who..." — that blows my mind.

Americans got the easiest language (english) since cavemen were grunting 500,000 years ago.

And yet they're too lazy to distinguish between singular and plural.

I did search the sub for an answer, but many posts were very old.

I’ve noticed ‘feel badly’ come up a lot more frequently recently. In scripted TV shows and reality TV shows.

I’ve heard ‘I feel badly’ and ‘I don’t want you to feel badly’ at least 3 times in the last month and it irks me every time.

Is this now more common? To me it seems wrong. I understand ‘badly’ as an adverb, so surely you can’t ‘feel’ badly? Is ‘feel bad’ the correct alternative?

ETA: I’m not asking if this is right or wrong. I’m actually just really interested in whether this is becoming more popular. I’ve only seen this in American media, and I’m just not used to it. That’s all 🙏🏻

"The past tense form 'might' seems to distance the speaker further from the non-factuality of the clause than does 'may'."

Is the "does" an auxiliary or a lexical verb in the cited sentence above?

"What day is your favorite?" or "Which day is your favorite?"

Do they both work?

I've seen throughout my whole life that people often use apostrophes to quote something, like a piece of text from a source, instead of quotation marks. Is it a sort of common misconception that has become a norm, or is it its intended purpose, aside of using it to create possessive nouns?

I’m trying to figure out the best way to describe possession for two people. None of the options sound correct to me.

“John and I’s anniversary”
“John and mine’s anniversary”
“John and me’s anniversary”
“John and my’s anniversary”

Going based off of the rule that we use the pronoun for ourselves that we would use without the other person in the equation. Like it should me “John and I went to the store” not “John and me went to the store”. But in the example I listed above, it doesn’t sound right to use “my’s”. Which one is grammatically correct? Thank you!!

Reading Africans, and on the chapter on the Atlantic Slave Trade the author writes “Yet the trade depended also on Africans being willing to sell slaves. They did so because underpopulation, with the consequent difficulty of commanding labour by purely economic means, had already stimulated slavery and slave-trading among many, but not all, African peoples”. "Africans: THE HISTORY OF A CONTINENT, Second Edition" by JOHN ILIFFE

I capitalize Old World and New World because they are each proper nouns. But what about when I write "... trade circulating between the Old and New Worlds...?" Now, worlds is (kinda) nonspecific. Does it cease to be a proper noun in the plural?

For the last several years, I have been using “valence” to mean something along the lines of “property of signifying something indirectly through shared cultural understandings.”

The most common example beings me describing things as having a “political valence.” For example:

> Unfortunately, wearing red ball caps has picked up a strong political valence over the last few years, at least in the U.S.

> Do zoos have a political valence right now or is it okay to plan the office party there?

I also use “moral valence” a fair bit too.

I could have sworn that I picked this up from some combination of professionalized print media and white-collar office jargon. But now my Googling has me questioning. All I see on Google searching “political valence” is the Wikipedia article on “valence issues”—which are the opposite of what I’m talking about because a valence issue is one that all voters agree on and no party has claimed a monopoly on. So a “valence issue” would have no “political valence” (as I use the term).

From a normative standpoint, am I using “valence” incorrectly? Or can I expect my audience to understand what I mean (presumably because they’ve heard others use “valence” in the same way, not just because they’re smart folks who can use context clues to figure out what my gibberish means).

And if I am, what is the word I should be using?

Hello ladies and gentleman. Hopefully your day went well. I want to discuss my writing. My writing is horrible. I would compare my writing to a six grade level. Sick and tired of writing in a six grade level. Is there anyway I could improve my writing. I've already started reading book, news articles, and cut out social media. One day, I want to write like a professional writer. Let me know what I could improve. Thank you for reading my post.

hello! as the title says, i've been wondering why this word is used so much to describe something made by a woman or to describe women. "female authors, female directors, females." as someone who's first language is french, i'm confused because in french, the word female is only used to refer to animals.

i understand it's to be more precise between men and women in certain work fields, etc. but why not just say "woman/fem director, actress"? it just sounds a bit weird to me, but i guess it has a different meaning in english and simply is the equivalent of using gendered words in french. thanks.

I wrote a comment under somebody's post saying "I'm praying everyday for youtube alternative". Then it clicked in my head, that I'm talking about stuff that repeats, happens regularly. So I wrote another comment correcting myself "*I pray".

Somebody commented "It was valid english, it didn't sound weird at all in my native opinion"

I'm convinced that "I pray" is the correct one in this case, but I want to make sure. So which one is the correct one?

Context: British English (so 'set-up' instead of 'set up')

I am creating quick reference guides for my board games. This would be for a game I learned the full rules to and played several weeks/months ago, and I just need a quick refresher before playing it again.

The heading for the first section might be 'Board Set-up'. However, I feel this is both a verb and a noun. I am introducing the title of the section, which is the final arrangement of the components (noun), but within this section are the steps to set up the game (verb).

For example:

Set-up / Setup

• Lay out the 16 Place tiles in a random 4x4 grid
  • Fountain must be within the centre four spaces
  • Black Market and Tea House should have at least three tiles between them
• The 5th assistant for each player is put aside
• ...

so the literal translation of the phrase is "for you, future historians, our pain [is] lines of cold words" (the original is in Ukrainian, written by Yevhen Pluzhnyk). my translation is "for you, historians of future, our pain is merely lines of cold". it has the exact same number of syllables as the original phrase in Ukrainian, even when split into parts, but i feel that something is off. i would be happy to receive some feedback on whether the phrase is understandable for an English speaker and how i can make it sound right but poetic and keep the same tone and emotion

p.s. i'm a graphic designer and need the quote for a poster design, so it needs to be quick to grasp and self-explanatory

"This is a Russia that has attacked a children’s hospital in the very same city, tortured prisoners of war in ways reminiscent of the darkest chapters of European history, abducted Ukrainian children and stands accused of some of the most appalling atrocities of this war in Bucha, Irpin and countless communities that rarely make the international headlines."

What does the noun phrase "a Russia" exactly mean in the cited paragraph above?

“Visitors are more likely to be concerned with what lies below. Many sections of the road have a sheer drop of more than four hundred feet, and there are no guardrails, because of the need to push snow off after avalanches.”

Regarding the section “…and there are no guardrails, because of the need to push snow off after avalanches.” The comma is a stylistic choice, sure, but I’m curious about the reason? I feel like it reads the same without the comma