English usage and grammar

Am I the only one that finds it weird that in English: "your disability got worse" and "your ability got worse" mean the same thing even though the words disability and ability effectively means the opposite thing, ie. Are antonyms.

Trying to improve my English. This is the Cambridge Dictionary and I would like to know what the '(C or U)' next to B1 means. Is it something important to master the English language? Thank you for your answers.

1. They're - only when you could say "They are" instead
2. There - a place
3. Their - for people

How can I talk anymore? Is it time to start pronouncing the first "d" in Wednesday?

"Grubhub to pay $25M for 'deceptive' practices against customers, drivers" I've been seeing this quite a bit in news headlines. Does the comma replace an "&"? Is it just a weird clickbaity incomplete sentence thing?

The word "elsewhere" conveniently exist to spare us the chore of saying "somewhere else". Why then do we waste or time saying "someone else" or "some other time"?

I'll be sitting a CAE exam this Friday and I'd enjoy learning some vocabulary I can use when doing it.

Some idiomatic expressions, collocations or just some fancy adjectives or adverbs that you think could be useful. Something that if the examiner saw would make them say wow.

There is an speaking part where it's mostly informal language that I'm going to use and a more formal writing part.

Thanks for your help.

I realized afterward that I forgot “a” 🤦‍♂️. Any other possible words or interpretations that I missed?

Ever wanted to understand where the phrase "needs washed" comes from? This is a good site to check out maps and explanations of local phrasings

Hello, English is my second language. I was just reading a sentence where I got a little confused with the use of "their":

In fact, the people prone to such behavior are liable to do it even more once there's no chance of their getting caught.

I've never heard "their" in this context, only "them getting caught". Is this correct grammar?

When I first learnt English, I thought this type of formulation only worked with a few verbs like "do", "have","should" (ex: "Should I do this? No, I shouldn't.")

More recently I also encountered "Need I?" and "needn't", tho they're more rarely used. But this got me wondering, is it still an exceptional construction, with "need" being one of the exceptions, or can it be done with every verbs? For example, are the following sentences correct:

• Read you mangas? No, I readn't them.
• Grow they potatoes? No, they grown't these.
• Sounds it like a good idea? No, it soundsn't.

I know talking like this would raise a few eyebrows, but does it break any established rule?

The first time I came across the usage of this phrase was in the movie Hellraiser, and I had no idea this was a common saying. Clearly though, there must be a double meaning there in the movie that I couldn't fully grasp without knowing the more colloquial meaning.

The description on Wikipedia is unfortunately not enough for me, I would like to see examples. And it's very hard to find those because Google gives me mostly links to religious websites.

Going off of this sequence of adjectives, “East Coast” would be categorized as origin (7) and “spicy” would categorized as type (9), correct?

For example, if you say that "feed" isn't a real word because there is a better way to say "issued someone a fee," but the real word is "feed" as in "to provide with nourishment," what would that error in judgment be called?

"I'll woo her again! One day she's mine!"
"I wood her before but she wasn't sure yet..."
"I woo'd her before but she wasn't sure yet..."
"I woed her before but she wasn't sure yet..."

How does this word work?

You know when something can be either "or" or "and?" You may also say it is "and" and or "or"; "or" and/or "and," if you will. That's the inclusive or!

The Latin "vel" is a word for the inclusive or. I also just learned that the logic symbol, ∨, is called "vel" and is used for something called "disjunction" as opposed to "exclusive disjunction (⊻)," which is simply the exclusive or, which is the regular or in English.

Apparently the legal term "vel non" uses this word to mean "or not," which means there's at least a chance of it making it out of the courtroom and into the common lingo like quid pro quo, de jure, and de facto, did.

For example:

It is a thing that works producing stuff.

This feels wrong to me, but I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is wrong about it. It seems like it's trying to be a participle phrase, but it's not necessarily modifying the current state of "it", and is, instead, describing what "it" is.

If it is, indeed, a participle phrase, then it should be able to be written as

Producing stuff, it is a thing that works.

But, to me, this doesn't seem correct either, so it leads me to believe that the very structure of the sentence is incorrect.

I did a quick search on google and, not only I see both versions, I even see both of them in the same document.

Example: Region-Enhancing Network for Semantic Segmentation of Remote-Sensing Imagery - PMC

the dataset with much more images
the dataset with many more images

Specific searches show these numbers:

• About 4,520,000 results for "much more images"
• About 2,780,000 results for "many more images"

Is there any difference between them?
Thanks!

I'm desperately looking for antonyms or somewhat opposites to "procedural". Checked on some antonym dictionaries but didn't find anything. More specifically it's about "procedural knowledge".

"Unplanned" or maybe "creative" could be some possibilities, but I wonder if something more appropriate could be found.

All possible suggestions greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Edit: Thanks everyone for the great suggestions! Together they led me to choose "exploratory" as somewhat opposite to "procedural". There's a huge variety of possibilities, but this one seems to fit my context well :)

I've linked this several times. Here it is. Just get (and read) this book.

Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language

Here's a podcast interview with the author if you're illiterate:

Corpse, Corps, Horse and Worse

As a non-native speaker I encounter this phrase from time to time (in podcasts and such) and I'd like to understand the use (beside the literal meaning which is obvious).

Why would you say that? or sometimes Why do you say that?

To me, that sounds almost rude, like rebuking the questioner. However, the context usually leads me to conclude that this sentence is to be understood neutrally, in the sense of "I am interested in the background of the question".

How should the sentence usually be used? Or does it depend solely on the tone the phrase is used?

I remember this clip from the wire where they discuss the difference between evacuating a place and evacuating a person. The Wire - Evacuate Found one example of what they discussed in an NPR article today and is made me laugh.A woman evacuate her horse.