英语惯用法

More on English usage
For BDCOL Students
Plurality, Possessiveness, at al.
• It’s means “it is,” while its means “belongs to it.” Its’ is not a word at all.
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It’s only a lot of reading if you do it.
• Similarly, there is no apostrophe in the possessives theirs, ours, hers, or yours.
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Yours, Mine, and Ours is not my favorite movie, but it is hers.
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Focusing exclusively on target selection begs the question of
why we are bombing at all.
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Your conclusions raise an interesting question: would
Linebacker II have worked in 1968?
• People do not try and do things, they try to do them. Try to remember this.
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The Pave Tack is down, so we’ll have to try to bomb visually.
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Please try not to embarrass me in front of the IG team this time.
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The exploding Titan hurled its warhead farther than CINCSAC would have liked.
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It’s easy to see how the F-15 got its nickname “Rodan.”
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The ABL program will be a fiasco unless its power problems can be solved.
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Their promotion criteriaห้องสมุดไป่ตู้seemed mainly to involve alcohol tolerance and family
influence.
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In effect, Schelling said that with nuclear weapons, the medium is the message.
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The media have blown my role in the food fight completely out of proportion.
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Lt. Cdr. Data is a medium, but Lt. Worf is an extra large.
More on plurals
already end in s (except for Jesus or ancient Greek or
Roman names ending in -is or -es).
•
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He said he believed in states’ rights, but he was
vague about what he meant by that.
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Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” became one of
Elvis’s trademarks.
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The AWACS’s lack of defensive systems may be its
Achilles’ heel.
Miscellaneous Pet Peeves
came here.
• Data, media and criteria are plural words (though treating “data” as singular gets more common all the time and is widely accepted now; it’s so sad). One data point is a datum; television or sand painting is a medium, and one of a set of criteria is a
• To beg a question means to evade it or to pretend that it has already been answered, it does not mean to raise it. This is a very common error. To say someone is begging a question is a criticism.
criterion.
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These data are presented in an unnecessarily confusing way.
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Force protection should not be the only criterion for judging military success.
• Plural nouns which end in “s” are made into possessive
adjectives by adding an apostrophe. Singular nouns are normally made possessive by adding ’s, even if they
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As usual, the error was theirs, but we were blamed for it.
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There’s a subtle perfection in everything I do.
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Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There’s no there there.” I guess she never