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- Why . . . ? vs. Why is it that . . . ? - English Language Usage Stack . . .
Why not: I don't know why, but it seems to me Bob would sound a bit strange if he said, "Why is it that you have to get going?" Eliminating 'that' before 'Bob' would seem to be more in context with the criticism of the way Bob sounds This beside the point that "Why do you have to get going?" is more direct
- What do we call the “rd” in “3ʳᵈ” and the “th” in “9ᵗʰ”?
@WS2 In speech, very nearly always In writing, much less so I think what may be going on is that one just assumes that “June 1” is pronounced “June First”, or “4 July” as “the Fourth of July”
- grammaticality - Is Why to. . . . . . grammatical? - English Language . . .
Why (which has no counterpart in ·ever) appears freely in the interrogative construction, as in This is why I’m leaving, but is marginally possible in the pseudo-cleft: Why I’m leaving is that because there’s no opportunity to use any initiative It does not occur elsewhere in fused relatives
- grammaticality - Is it incorrect to say, Why cannot. . . . ? - English . . .
There are also many examples of "Why we cannot", but they are not interrogatives JForrest explains that 'cannot' is the negative form of 'can', and so 'cannot' should be placed in the same location as 'can' would be in a sentence Since we can say "Why can we grow taller?", "Why cannot we grow taller?" is a logical and properly written negative
- How did the letter Z come to be associated with sleeping snoring?
See also Why Does ZZZ mean sleep? for another theory: The reason zzz came into being is that the comic strip artists just couldn’t represent sleeping with much As the sounds made while sleeping are quite difficult to represent with letters, the artists chose zzz, because it best represents the sound
- Contextual difference between That is why vs Which is why?
You never know, which is why but You never know That is why And goes on to explain: There is a subtle but important difference between the use of that and which in a sentence, and it has to do primarily with relevance Grammarians often use the terms "restrictive" and "non-restrictive" when it comes to relative clauses
- grammar - Is For why improper English? - English Language Usage . . .
"For why" (also hyphenated or written as one word) meaning "why" as a direct interrogative was used in Old and Middle English (see the MED's entry), but it became obsolete sometime around the year 1500 Other senses of the expression (for example, it was used as a conjunction meaning "because") gradually over time all dropped out of use, so the
- Whats the history of the English letter Y as a sometimes vowel?
Wondering when and why historically the Anglo-Saxon letter "Y" became a (part-time) vowel substitute for the letter "I", leading to "gymnasium" instead of "gimnasium" or "cyanide" instead of "cianide" etc
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