English tips.

Millhouse

Thank you. Though I still don;t fully get it.

Webster dictionary has an entry “stop by ” they give an example “Feel free to stop by anytime.”
Cambridge has a similar entry with example “He stopped by the office to drop off a copy of the contract.”

Why would “He stopped by the office…” be acceptable but “He stayed by the office to do some work.” not be.

You wrote “you can certainly stop by at your cousin’s home, ”
so I cannot “Stop by his home” ?
Thanks

And it isnt just yiddish and German’s I work among Italians and they all say it (though i suppose it is possible they got it from Jews they say schlep, kvetch etc )

Milhouse, no, the opposite of guys is gals; not girls.

And the reference to “girls” I referred to were not regarding any servants or maids.

Ubiquitin, the difference is that it’s an adverb, not a preposition. An adverb is a description of an action. In “to stop by”, “stop” is the action, and “by” is the way you are doing it. That’s why you can say “stop by”, without specifying a place; you couldn’t do that with the Yiddish preposition “bei”.

“Stop by” is a synonym of “drop in”. And just as you don’t “drop in your cousin”, but rather you “drop in to your cousin”, or “…at your cousin’s home”, so too with stopping by; you stop by at her home.

I suspect that “stopping by her home”, which you cite from the Cambridge, is either a usage that derives from the Yiddish/German, or else it a modified form of “passing by her home”, but in this case pausing briefly; in that case “by” is being used in the sense of “near”.

What about starting a sentence with “So …”? That’s a common trend these days.

I threw my wife out the window the newspaper.

“So” at the beginning of a sentence fills the same function as “Hinei” in Hebrew. The technical term is “discourse marker”.

I threw my wife out the window the newspaper.

I think that usage comes directly from German.

Millhouse

thanks
I really want to get this 2 questions

1)
so the phrase “Please stop by my office” is not correct?
you say “you stop by at her home.” So I stopped by her office” is not correct should be “I stopped by at her office” ?

2) Webster’s defines “by” as “at or to another’s home” They literally define “by ” as “at”
Am I reading it wrong? Are they wrong?

i love this

Another Yiddishism that people use incorrectly in English: using “what” to mean “a thing”, or “where” to mean “a place”, as in “I have what to do”, “I have what to eat”, “I have where to eat”. People without Yiddish or German in their background do not say these things.

Then there are Yiddishisms that have not crept into English, but are sometimes used by Yiddish-speakers with imperfect English. One of my teachers used to say “lime” instead of “clay”, because in Yiddish clay is ליים, while lime is קאלך. I was very confused until I figured out what was happening.

Another teacher would say things like “he gave him a gift”, which sounded very nice but from the context was clearly not supposed to be nice at all. I soon realized that he was using the Yiddish word גיפט, which means poison. I don’t think anyone else in the class ever figured out what he was talking about.

12 AM is universally understood to mean midnight and 12 PM is universally understood to mean noon. It is never used in the reverse of that.

There might be some ambiguity whether noon and midnight (and hence the following day of the week) technically begin at 12:00:00 or if they begin at 12:00:01. IOW, at 12 exactly or at one second after 12.

For once I’m with huju. The meridian is noon. 12AM is 12 hours before noon, i.e. midnight. And 12PM is 12 hours after noon, i.e. midnight. Noon, by definition, is neither before itself nor after itself!

Joseph says “12PM” is “universally” understood to mean noon. I wonder which universe he refers to, and how he determined this. When I see someone write 12PM I ask them what they meant.

Milhouse, if someone asks you to meet them at 12 PM, you might show up to their house at midnight? In all the years I’ve never heard noon referred to as 12 AM.

I won’t argue about what’s technically/linguistically the correct terminology or usage, but as a practical/real-world usage 12 PM is unambiguously used to refer to the afternoon and 12 AM is used to refer to midnight. I’ve yet once to see it used in the reverse of that.

Correction: The second definition of “stop by” is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

huju: Spoken/conversational English is what eventually makes it into the official language and the dictionary.

When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary or the editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary see a word has entered the lexicon with its common usage, they add said word to their dictionary.

They publish new editions of the dictionary every number of years, with new entries. In fact, they now even add words between editions.

Here are some tough ones: “Towing the line” is a real thing that people actually do. But most of the time when you see that written it’s a mistake, and the writer meant “toeing the line”.

“Soft pedal” and “soft sell” are both valid English phrases that are not identical but very close in meaning; so it’s easy to understand how some people get confused and write “soft peddle”, which is not a valid phrase.

How do you pronounce ‘ghoti’? Fish as rough, women and nation.