Michael Swan in his book ( - page 3/ page 4) writes about above/over  1) &quot;Higher than&quot;: Above or over Above and over can both mean &quot;higher than Can you see a helicopter above/over a palace?  Okay, I make a conclusion they are the same here. 2) &quot;not directly over&quot;: above We prefer above when one thing is not directly over than another. We've got a little house above the lake  The thing that is meant here, as I can guess, is the house is higher but it's not on the same vertical line with the lake. If there were &quot;over&quot; here We've got a little house over the lake then we would have to understand it like the house is hovering/levitating above the lake with no logical explanation. Am thinking right? This case I am feeling troubled because in the first way of usage the choice of above/over means the same thing while in the second one it's different. Having read the second usage, should I take Can you see a helicopter above a palace? like the helicopter is at a higher position than the palace but it is not directly over the building? And should I understand Can you see a helicopter over a palace? like it's right over the roof that if it goes down it will land exactly onto the top of the palace? I see it as a problem because the author firstly says they are equal but then gives an example with an explanation where they are different. How should I distinguish the first usage senteces where they are the same from the second usage sentences where they would mean a different thing?
19076
I read in some good grammar book that &quot;Above&quot; and &quot;over&quot; can both mean &quot;higher than&quot;: The example from the book  Can you see the helicopter above/over the palace?   Then below it was written that We prefer &quot;above&quot; when one thing is not directly over another The example from the book  We've got a little house above the lake  The question is is the helicopter in the first example directly over the palace or no if both &quot;above&quot; and &quot;over&quot; can be used?
96061
In common American English usage, these two questions elicit the same response:   Do you have a ticket? Don't you have a ticket?   These are the usual answers (I was going to say "possible answers" but I can think of a whole host of situations where one could get other answers, e.g. wake up someone in the middle of the night and ask it, the answer might easily be "I don't know" or "maybe" or "hey, just let me sleep!"... but that's neither here nor there... :-)   Positive: "Yes" or "Yes, I do". Negative "No" or "No, I do not".   But consider this: the questions are logically equivalent to:   You have a ticket, right? You do not have a ticket, right?   Here I am not so sure that a "Yes, that's right" response means the same thing to each question. (One could still, however, use "Yes, I do" as @F'x answer in  illustrates, to remain valid and unambiguous.)  (As a side note, it is interesting to compare the same question in Chinese, where one literally asks "Do you have/not have a ticket?" and the common answers are:   "[I] have" "[I] not have"   ...which also removes the ambiguity... while at the same time straying from my original question:-)  So why can I rewrite the questions so that they are essentially equivalent yet expect different answers?
56149
I'm not a native english speaker, so even though I'm decently proficient at it, I don't really "know the rules" sometimes, and this is one that's been confusing me for a long time.  Which one is correct in each sentence?     If the movement [was/were] to continue uncorrected, the tower would   one day topple.      If I [was/were] rich, I would buy a yacht.   NOTE: I care not only about the case of "I", but also "she", "them", "it", etc, as in the example of the tower. Would it be any different if instead of the tower, it'd be me who'd topple if uncorrected?  I'm pretty sure it's "were" in both cases. That's what they taught me, I think. I started to doubt when I saw a lot of "was", but it sounded like the typical intentional mistake used "stylistically". ("If I was a rich girl...")  Then I saw it some more and thought it came down to an American/British English difference (I was taught British, in theory, and most of what I read is American).    But that tower sentence came straight from "The Guardian"...  When do you use was and when do you use were?
25488
Consider the following sentence     It will/would rain tomorrow.   I understand "would" usually means something that is really improbable.  So "it would happen" means it might happen but it is very unlikely; while "it will happen" means it is going to happen  But what if I want to say      It will not happen?   Because the meaning of "it will not happen" represents something that is unlikely or, worse still, not going to happen, shouldn't it be more accurate to say "it would not happen"?  However, to contravene the aforesaid suggestion - if I am confident that the thing is not going to happen, should I use "will" to indicate the definite nature of my statement?  To further complicate the issue, what if I want to say     I think you will not be able to do it.    or      I think you would not be able to do it.    Which one is more accurate/correct,  given that "I think" already conveys a sense of "less than definite" and "will/would not be able to" conveys the same sense as "unlikely"?
13231
I was watching the film A Game of Shadows starring Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law when this line came up, "...neither you nor I is in control..." (I can’t remember the exact words that ended the phrase; if anyone can supply them, it would be much appreciated.)   It immediately struck me as being odd. When I mentioned this to my boyfriend; an English native speaker, with a PhD in something sciency, he told me it was correct. When I asked why, he couldn't explain but put forward the following sentence as an example. "Neither of us is in control..." However, I disagreed with the wording and said the sentence should have been: "Neither one of us is in control..." The genderless third person, one, is singular, and hence, so too the verb that follows. And we say, "one is" NOT "one are".      "Neither you nor I are in control over ..."    I believe the above sounds better, but it is more logical to say:     "Neither you nor I am in control..."    because the verb agrees with the subject closest to it; however, I'm not sure if I have ever read or heard this solution. So, I tried inverting the subject and auxiliary verb order and the resulting phrase was:    "Neither you nor am I in control..."    which sounds very formal, pompous, and ... odd. Am I imagining things?  The two subjects you and I are two separate individuals who are not joined together, I agree the verb should be in the singular; but why should we use "is"? We don't say, "you is" or "I is". Before anyone rushes off to claim my question is a duplicate of a previous Stackexchange one:  I want to explain why the answer to that question fails to explain why my boyfriend and the film makers consider the  sentence below correct:     Neither you nor I is in control...   As I see it, Michael and Albert are two separate individuals, it therefore stands to reason that the verb should be singular, and "is" agrees with the subject. If I rephrase the neither and nor construction, I would get:          Michael is not correct but neither is Albert   OR          Michael is not correct and Albert isn't either.      Which have the same meaning, (either being the negative equivalent of neither) the sentences are grammatical which leads me to conclude that the verb must be singular and hence         Neither Michael nor Albert is correct      However, when I rephrase the "neither you nor I" sentence following the same procedure I have to say this:        You are not in control but neither am I (‘I am’ is ungrammatical)   OR              You are not in control and I’m not either.      which leads me to surmise that the sentence below must be grammatically correct        Neither you nor I am in control"      So, why does my boyfriend insist that the sentence ought to be:     Neither you nor I is in control   Which one of us is right and why?
40190
Yesterday, I've listened to a song called "Fear not this night". I find the syntax unusual (as a foreigner, I have never encountered it). Is it the same meaning as "Don't fear this night" ? What's the slight difference between these 2 ?  Thank you for your time.
44664
I keep hearing people say everything is not… which frustrating because it is ambiguous. It could mean either     Nothing is… (for the set of all things, no thing is…)   or      Not everything is… (for the set of all things, some things are not…/not all things are…)   I have been hearing it more and more in the past few years. In fact, when you , you get Selena Gomez’s rendition of the Wizards of Waverly Place theme song which only further popularizes it with the youth.  Is this phrase grammatically correct/legitimate (ie, would an English teacher complain?), and if so, which is the correct meaning (if any)?
100394
I instinctively translate it "as best as you can", however this makes no sense.  What is the real structure behind this phrase?  I'll include an  to illustrate the historical presence of this phrase:    Whatever the structure is, I'm guessing that it has something to do with 19th century grammar.
23243
I am not a native speaker. On a previous question of mine, I thanked for an answer by saying:     So the phrase is not an idiom, since it is applied in its literal sense.   I consciously chose since over because, because — well, I like that usage of since, even though I know that some (native speakers) don't like it. Nonetheless, that choice got me thinking for a while, and it occurred to me that I even could have used more alternatives, namely as or for, without changing the meaning.   So, on a general note, here are the alternatives:        Statement A (is true), because statement B (is true).   Statement A (is true), since statement B (is true).   Statement A (is true), as statement B (is true).   Statement A (is true), for statement B (is true).      Are these completely interchangeable? Or interchangeable in certain situations? Or can you point out any (not-so-)subtle differences between any of them? Are there even more synonyms?
40740
Are these two totally synonymous? Can one be used in place of the other anywhere? Are there any differences in nuance, or anything at all?
41287
Let $S$ represent the English statement "Sales will go up."And let $E$ represent the English statement "Expenses will go up." Now my problem is that I have trouble telling the difference between these two statements: $\neg(S\land Q)$ and $\neg S \land \neg E$. When these two statements are translated into English they sound,to me, the same. However, when you look at their truth tables they are different.   Here is my best translation of these two statements:  1) $\neg(S\land E)$ represented in English, "Both sales and expenses will not go up."(Correct me if I translated it wrong)  2)$\neg S \land \neg E$ represented in English, "Expenses will not go up and sales will not go up."(Again, correct me if I'm wrong)  I still do not understand the difference between these two statements in the English representation. They both sound the same thing to me.  Once more, I have the same trouble I have with understanding with the or-connective( $\lor$ ). Again let E and S be the same statements as before.Tell me if I might have translated them wrong.  1) $\neg (S \lor E)$ represented in English is "Neither sales nor expenses will go up."  2)$\neg S \lor \neg E$ represented in English is "Sales will not go up, or Expenses will not go up."  Yet I still have trouble understanding the difference between the English translation.  In short, can you give me some alternative example that better explains the difference, something intuitive that gives me a clear picture of the difference of the meaning between the statements I showed with the connective-or and connective-and. Thank you.
54334
Reading some books and posts I noticed that there are some semantice differences between constructions described in the title of this post. Could someone help me to find out what are the real difference and in which situations are better to use appropriate constructions?  I would be very grateful to hear the correct answer.
119074
This appears to be a new question to MSE according to Approach0 (surprisingly).     I'm looking for a detailed description of the difference between $\vdash$ and $\vDash$ in the study of logics, even for nonclassical logics. So: what's the difference?   My own, rather cobbled together understanding is that $\vdash$ concerns the "syntax" of the logic in question, whereas $\vDash$ concerns the "semantics" of (or "meaning behind") the syntax, as determined by some system of interpretation of the syntax.  I am aware that, for a logic $\mathcal{L}$ to be complete, then by definition of completeness, one needs $\Sigma\vDash_{\mathcal{L}} \Delta$ to imply $\Sigma\vdash_{\mathcal{L}} \Delta$.  Similarly, for a logic $\mathcal{L}$ to be sound, one needs $\Sigma\vdash_{\mathcal{L}} \Delta$ to imply $\Sigma\vDash_{\mathcal{L}} \Delta$.  Now, I've dabbled in logic for several years now, so I'm slightly embarrassed that I don't have enough of a grasp of these basic concepts in order to tell the difference a lot of the time.  I'm reading Priest's "An Introduction to Non-classical Logic: From If to Is (Second Edition)." Logics that are both sound &amp; complete are presented there (but such logics typically have gluts, gaps, or some funky "many worlds" interpretation, so as to avoid Gödel's incompleteness theorem(s), I suppose).
22983
A book suggests that we should not interchange "so" and "so that". "So" means "therefore", and "so that" means "in order that". However, it seems to me that in many cases they don't actually have a difference. For example:     Alice got up at 5:00 A.M., so that she could drive her son to school.   If I substitute "so that" with "so", this sentence presents the exact same causal relation to me:     Alice got up at 5:00 A.M., so she could drive her son to school.   I must have missed something here, since English is my second language. Could somebody explain the difference?
41013
This is something that confuses me from time to time. When making an analogy in literature, is it better to use the phrase "as if" or "as though", or is it completely a style thing?  E.g.      She looked frazzled, as if she had just gotten off of a roller coaster.   or     She looked frazzled, as though she had just gotten off of a roller coaster.
114036
They appear to me to mean almost if not exactly the same thing, but I am not sure. Are there differences in meaning between them?
72660
I have often read "None of the above" at the end of multiple-choice questions (and I guess this is shorthand for "None of the above items").  Recently, in answering a help center email with my answer on top of the help center’s suggestions, I wrote "none of the below helps me". It struck me as incorrect just after having send it. I guess I should have put "None of the items below".  But it seems to me it is a matter of usage rather than logic : if "the above" is OK, what’s wrong with "the below" ?