Word: sir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sir: Whenever a language expert begins pushing "standards" of English usage [Aug. 22], he is actually telling us what his standards are and what biases he holds concerning the language...
...Sir: Since the judges for the American Heritage's dictionary have decreed the death penalty for all who use like as a conjunction [Aug. 22], a hangman's noose would have been the appropriate end for Elyot, Shakespeare, Smollett, Southey, Newman, Washington Irving, Darwin and William Morris (of Morris chair fame, not the dictionary's editor). Edmund Spenser should perhaps have been flogged for anticipating the TVese use of host as a transitive verb. Since advise in the sense of "notify" is business and Army English, Willa Gather and Sir Richard Steele must have been members...
...sorry, sir, but my men refused to go . . . We cannot move...
...lived today, Job would undoubtedly be a fan of the New York Mets. So would Sir Francis Bacon ("Adversity is not without comforts and hopes"). So is anyone with the slightest sympathy for the underdog, the smallest shred of a sense of futility, the least understanding of how it feels to lose, and lose, and lose...
...should have been obvious that Brigadier General Sir Harry Flashman was just too bad to be true. Liar, lecher, bully, coward and (according to his Who's Who entry, reprinted here) survivor of nearly every 19th century military disaster from the Siege of Lucknow to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he is as appalling and implausible a scoundrel as has ever shambled through the purlieus of the past. All the odder then that since this first volume of his purported "memoirs" was published recently in the U.S., all decked out with notes and glossary, no fewer than...