Both the OED and Websters recognize the "in a moment" definition of momentarily, although "for a moment" is still the principal definition.

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i suppose i can agree to this, but the point is that modifying it with 'more unique', 'most unique', and 'very unique' seems silly. obviously describing something as utterly without compare is just as nonsensical - but to say someone is 'very unique' is merely a rhetorical flourish, it just sounds good, but it also sounds stupid when you stop to consider just what was said.

george carlin had a twenty page rant about usage in his first book - almost all of these are covered there (momentarily, unique, etc.).

This thread has been severely bad for my original goal of fiddling with small electronic doodads today. Good job OOT!

No you didn't. Therein lies the problem.

Main Entry:
same Listen to the pronunciation of 1same
Pronunciation:
\ˈsām\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Old Norse samr; akin to Old High German sama same, Latin simulis like, simul together, at the same time, similis like, sem- one, Greek ***** same, hama together, hen-, heis one
Date:
13th century

1 a: resembling in every relevant respect

Nonsense, it's all about context.

Amanda: Where is everyone?
Tracy: They're all outside eating lunch.
Amanda: Did they get it from Pizza Hut?
Tracy: Yeah, everyone's having Pizza Hut except Gabriel. He's a health nut, and lactose intolerant too, so he went next door to that vegan joint. Weirdo.
Amanda: Wait, are you saying Oscar finally got a different lunch than Gabriel?
Tracy: Oh sorry, no, they got the same lunch again. Oscar followed Gabriel into the vegan place.

<Amanda goes outside, sees 12 people eating pizza, then sees Oscar and Gabriel on another bench, both eating vegan sandwiches. Goes back inside>

Amanda: WTF you lying bitch, you said Oscar and Gabriel got the same lunch, and it turns out Oscar's sandwich is a grilled portobello mushroom sandwich and Gabriel's is tofu. You're fired.

(In other words, the focus of the communication is a shorthand way of saying they went to the same place but ordered different items. For the purposes of comparing them to the other 12 people, they got the same lunch. To identify their lunches between each other, they did not get the exact same lunch.)

EDIT:

Which is my point -- for Tracy, the only relevant aspects were the location of the lunch orders. For 12 people, they all got the same thing: Pizza Hut. For the other 2 guys, they got vegan. For Amanda, the particular items were just as relevant.

I saw one of mine in the paper today:

"16 teams comprise one of the strongest fields..."

NONONONONONONO! The whole comprises the parts. The parts compose a whole.


Plus...don't even get me started about when sports teams finally begin to gel. It's 'jell'.

Or, when referring to the Oilers people say "Edmonton are 4-2-1 on the road this season.". No "Edmonton IS 4-2-1 on the road this season." You're talking about a team, not a bunch of individuals.

Thank you so very much. I feel someone understands me.

I am posting a few paragraphs from a story I wrote some time ago. It's called "Apostrophe Now." Enjoy.

I sit here on the sunny windowsill of my ground floor Geary St. apartment, the varied San Francisco foot traffic shuffling, stumbling, and scurrying by. I am smoking another Newport, and I am considering the apostrophe that taunts me from the fruit stand directly across the street. The cardboard sign above the crate of oranges reads Orange’s $1.99. I am nonplussed by the orphaned apostrophe. In spite of having had 34 long years to adapt and reconcile and understand things, I still manage to find myself somehow dismayed by this forlornly parasitic possessive.

Here's another:

Recently, I had what is commonly and I suppose accurately referred to as a “health scare.” I made reference to it earlier when I mentioned my whore wife. I had developed an odd condition which entailed headaches of impressively sadistic quality coupled with a nearly narcoleptic lust for sleep. The doctor had ordered a battery of tests from bloodwork to a CAT scan to more bloodwork. Words like tumor and malignancy and cancer were not mentioned, but it was understood they existed in theory, in the limitless realm of possibility made not quite probable, but clearly more abstractly present than previously acknowledged.
At the blood-letting center, there was a sign on the wall at the welcome desk. This sign was not written on cardboard and was not scrawled in blue crayon like the sign across Geary. This sign was written on a computer using an elegant font, it had a logo for the blood-letting company at the top, and it was printed on heavy-bond paper. It was lovingly framed. It read:

“All Phlebotomist’s are helping other patients right now. Please be seated.”

My first reaction was to wonder why the word phlebotomists should warrant the bastard apostrophe, but not patients. Is there some word hierarchy about which I was never made aware? Do the lower, less ornate words get short-shrift in this perverse and unjust lexicon? And who could be so presumptive as to assign such status?
Having wasted enough time considering this inane question, I shifted gears a bit and directly addressed my concern with the woman behind the counter. Her name, if the tiny tag on her enormous left breast had any basis in reality, was Sharma. She was a sizeable African-American lady in pink and purple flowered scrubs. She did not look up when I said “excuse me,” but I continued unscathed.
“I just thought you might like to know that there is an error on this little sign. You have used an apostrophe—“
“Please have a seat and one of the phlebotomist's will be right with you.”

One more:

A few weeks prior to the earning of her moniker of whore wife, we were driving back from dinner in North Beach. She asked me if she could stop at “an ATM machine.” I chuckled a little, and said OK. She asked why I had chuckled, so I reluctantly but smilingly explained to her that her request had contained a slight redundancy, and that hey, no big deal—everyone makes the same mistake.
This was met with stony silence, and an awkward moment before I realized she didn’t really know which aspect of her query was redundant. I felt things sliding into potentially unpleasant territory, so I said, “As I said, it’s nothing, really. The M in ATM actually stands for machine. So what you said was “Automatic Teller Machine Machine,” which is a redundancy. As I said, everyone does it. Did you enjoy your fra diavlo?”
Then it began: “Everyone says ATM Machine, so that’s what it’s called. Have you considered the possibility that YOU’RE the one who’s wrong? Maybe YOU’RE wrong!”
Asked the Lord above for mercy, save me if you please.
The crossroads.
“Look, I don’t want to argue about it. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just, just…never mind. Yes, you’re right. If everyone says it, then it’s probably right, and I am probably wrong. No problem. It’s colloquial, a matter of a phrase coming into usage…let’s just move on. I think there’s an ATM just up ahead on Divisidero—“
I knew immediately that I had just made a fatal error.
“You did that on purpose! You’re just trying to make me feel stupid! I get it; everyone ELSE says ATM machine, but you do not because you’re smarter than me and smarter than everyone else. I get it.” She was getting beside herself; there was no denying it.
I wished I could get back to the crossroads, but they were way back in my rearview, barely visible. I pulled the car over next to the Bank of America on Divisadero, and said “Ok, here’s your ATM machine. Don’t forget your PIN number.”
I don’t know why she took this particular moment to fully grasp what I was saying, but she did. She turned to me, and there was genuine revulsion. She looked as if she had found a giant bug cocoon in her mouth after a big bite of a peach. I immediately wondered if loathing of this strain could be dealt with, concluding without hesitation that it could not, and so I ceased to try.

Just thought I'd share.

agree 100%, using exact tightens the scope of same.

This one is so damned simple, yet even otherwise intelligent people seem to make this mistake all the time.

Here's another:

My accountant is always saying that something is a "mute point."

Arg.

if there can be different degrees of uniqueness, what modifier should people use?

What if they say "The Oilers are 4-2-1 on the road?" Same team. By your logic they should say "The Oilers is 4-2-1 on the road." The team didn't change by virtue of your referring to them by the mascot as opposed to the city. (By the way, referring to them by the city is a nice little synecdoche).

Similarly, I don't know how to use band names in this regard. I tend to say:

"R.E.M. is a great band."
and
"The Killers are a good band."

It's inconsistent, but I find that it reads better when the verb agrees with either a plural or singular band name.

I'm not sold on this reasoning. Suppose that a married couple is approaching but I can't yet discern who they are. I would say "Hark, a married couple is approaching." Then when they get close I can tell it's Amy and Steve. "I revise my earlier statement; Amy and Steve are approaching." Amy and Steve and the married couple both have the same referent but in one case I'd use the plural and in the other case I wouldn't. I think this team business might be the same.

It reminds me, if the past tense of "catch" is "caught", I could never figure ou why the past tense of "pitch" wasn't "paught".

Not sure where you're going with this unless you're referring to the "momentarily" bit. Which reminds me, a great term to use if you're looking to buy time is the redneck word "fixin'". As in you're fixin' to do something. It's ideal because it doesn't mean you've actually started doing it, just that you're fixin' to do it. So you're at a bar and the old lady calls. Just tell her you're fixin' to leave. This will buy you some time.

Yeah me too. That's why I followed up with the rock band example. I think it sounds better when the verb agrees with whether the band (or team or whatever) is a singular or plural name. Like, "The Miami Heat is 10-9 this season" vs. "The Los Angeles Lakers are 16-3 this season." In both cases it's the team name, but the verb is different.

I'm just saying it uses a different logic than the poster was saying -- his argument was that it should be singular because you're talking about a team, not a group of individuals. That has nothing to do with it imo.

This begs the question (!), when is it ok to make verbs out of nouns?*

I'm not a fan of vacation as a verb and I agree with wookie on fair catch. However, I think pen is fine.

Maybe the rule should just be that if you have a noun phrase (if that's what it's called) such as fair catch then it can't be made into a verb. That leaves vacation, but I'm not sure what to do about that without getting rid of pen and the like.



* What is the correct punctuation for the above sentence? When the sentence is a statement that finishes in a question I'm never sure what do.

Examples:
A question I just thought of is what kind of punctuation should I use at the end?.

Maybe:
A question I just thought of is "what kind of punctuation should I use at the end?".

That, however, seems to be a violation of the American English Punctuation Inside Quotation Marks Act of 1835 which was pointed out above.

"Rarely has the question been asked "is our children learning?"." ???

For me, if you're referring to them as a singular name singular (Lightning, Chelsea, Jazz) I use "is". If it's plural (Oilers, Baggies, Celtics) I use 'are' for the reason you mention...it sounds better.

In journalism school they taught us that when it's acting as a unit, it's described as singular. When it's acting as individuals within a group, it's plural.

"The jury is deliberating."
"The jury are arguing about what to have for lunch."

I would definitely say "The Miami Heat are 10-9 this season." Same with the Utah Jazz.

But for bands I agree. "The Beatles are..." "Led Zeppelin is..." (though "are" is used pretty frequently there).

Anyone else really annoyed by TV people constantly using the present tense of verbs when they should be using the past tense?

unique is enough in itself. that's my point - when you describe a person as 'unique', the meaning is conveyed there. obviously that person is not unique - not utterly without compare - but when a person is 'unique', it means they're often quirky or odd.

it's not unique in the sense that a square is a unique rectangle or a circle is a unique ellipse (or something similar, that might be an incorrect usage of unique in that context). but still, just 'unique' is enough. people say 'very unique' because they are used to saying things like 'very tall', etc.

lol you are quite the hipster

I'm thinking it's probably spin-o-ramas, but I'm not too sure, and lol hockey.

I think this is right, isn't it? I would probably say 'forwent' also. I'm sure as **** not saying 'forgoed'.

Haven't heard this word in probably 15 years. Bless you private joker.

hopefully some people in this thread recognize the line between clarity and pedantry.

I, too, find attorney generals horribly unclear.

mental image is something like this: