Then and Than?!

[jonathanm]

..."is you is, or is you ain't my baby?" mod: Dang! Mewman done beat me to it.OK, I'll toss one in from the late great cajun chef, Justin Wilson:"Now lemme tell ya what I'm gonna did."

[christig]

Orest, you really hit on a pet peeve of mine bringing up the 'then' and 'than' thing.I see this misuse in professional writings all the time. It is no wonder English is hard! We can't even get it right!As far as the Y'all thing. When I was in the south I was told Y'all was singular and All Y'all was plural. One thing I learned never to say was 'you guys' because I was accused of being from the North. But that was twenty years ago.And the dangling participles? I always thought that was something that was stuck in my teeth! One more reason I never majored in English. . .

[orest]

Well, I do understand that English is a difficult language to learn! And, there are words almost no one can speak except people like Patrick Stewart (Star Trek, X-men and so on). He is a brilliant speaker, and he has done interviews that I don't understand at all, using so many difficult words like Pathogenic, Occular, and so on..This thread has grown... a lot..!

[ncc1701]

Mar 15, 2009, 3:41pm, kelysian wrote:There are still some things I can only express in Swedish. "Gäller" is one verb that really doesn't have an equivalent in English and I wish I could use it and people here would understand me. When you say "Det gäller," you mean something like "That'll do," or "It'll suffice," but it's just not the same.GASP! I just had something terrible hit me. I was thinking of the wrong Swedish word when I wrote that. Man, do I feel stupid.It's "duger." "Det duger" means "that'll suffice." "Gäller" is another non-translatable word that means "concerns" or "has to do with." I don't know how many times I've caught myself from saying "gäller" in the middle of an otherwise perfectly normal English sentence, just because it means exactly what I want to say.Forgive me, Swedish friends. I really did speak it fluently once upon a time. Kathleen

[orest]

You are forgiven