Recent content by probus

It's hard to be absolutely certain without more context but I'm pretty sure it's American military slang for a duty assignment. A soldier ordered to stand guard is pulling guard duty, and one who has to peel potatos is pulling KP (kitchen patrol).

No, I doesn't work there. Also, I've never heard of anyone feeling like a gooseberry. What does it mean? Is it perhaps a translation of a Chinese expression?

In both cases you should use the definite artcle before "US Defense Department".

As Glizdka's question tends to imply, "all in one goal" doesn't make sense.

To me there is no practical difference in meaning. Doubt is one of those nouns that can be countable and non-countable with no difference.

Monty Python made a lot of jokes about smegma.

Maybe you're just too young, chief. 🙂

To me the sentence is rather redundant. We are not born with knowledge. Therefore everything we now know we must have learnt in the past. The only sense the sentence makes is that we still know what we have learnt unless we have forgotten. In some varieties (for example, Indian English) people...

Only option a works for me.

I think it's a bit old-fashioned. My father was fond of it because of its word-play aspect -- shoes too tight?

Notwithstanding emsr2d2's understandable aversion, a descriptivist would accept "off of" as valid because it is used (at least in AmE) and has been for a long time. If I heard it, however, I'd assume the speaker was uneducated.

None at all.

You are right Amigos4 about what Perry White used to say. However, I have never seen the film Back to the Future. Nevertheless the N-Gram about "Great Scott" is valid.

The only place I recall hearing Great Scott is in the old Superman TV series. Perry White, the character who was Clark Kent's editor, used it frequently. I consider it rather dated but according to Google Ngrams it is enjoying a resurgence after reaching a low point around 2000...

All such things are called minced oaths, although the use of that term has tailed off sharply since 2000. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Minced+oath&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3