On August 15, 2015 at 14:45, adamav said...
English is my second language here as well, me and Mario come from the same place ;) ...upon my arrival I have learned that he had a pair of exotic and very low IMPEDANCE speakers , so I have connected the dots and quickly replied to the client ( with a heavy Polish accent ) : " You have an IMPOTENCE problem " ...
A guy is preparing to have a vasectomy, and to his wife's complete confusion he buys a new, expensive suit. She asks him why; he says "well, if I'm going to be impotent, I want to look impotent!"
Mario, I know this is talking about words, but hey, you started it.
On August 14, 2015 at 21:47, Mario said...
Going back to the second or third post about using a level for plumb lines.
Level is both a flat horizontal plane and a name of a tool.
English has clear hints about a lot of this stuff, but not all of it. You say it yourself, level is (more accurately, level is a description of) a flat horizontal plane, and A level ("A" indicates that a noun, the name of a thing and not a descriptive term) follows. So level is an adjective that describes something, and is also a noun that names an actual thing
Sort of like hammer is used to drive nails, but because it also had the claw, the hammer can be used to pull nails out, much like pry-bar.
I never talk so technically that I call such a hammer a claw hammer, but that is, technically, the proper name for the tool you describe. See, your confusion as a new speaker of English comes from needing to know the technical term, claw hammer, so you can understand that native speakers of English don't usually bother to say "claw." It's understood. You can see 23 types of hammers at
[Link: me-mechanicalengineering.com], but the one with the claw is the average home and construction hammer.
English is a weird language: things like "park in driveway and drive on underground highway", or setting "OFF the alarm".
Poor you, non-native speaker of English. The joke was park on a driveway and drive on a parkway. As for the alarm, setting it off is different from turning it off. I cannot explain "set it off" AT ALL, if I may be excused for shouting.
I remember when I first started dating my now wife.
We lived an apartment complex on 2nd floor.
I have to ask: was this one floor up from the ground, which we call the second floor in the US, or two flights up, which the rest of the world calls the second floor? I love being in an elevator and pressing zero!
After going shopping, she asked me to get the groceries down.
I took them out of the Trailblazer and placed them on the ground.
She was as confused about the results as I was about her request.
I honestly thought she wanted me to get them out of the Trailblazer because she needed to take the SUV somewhere.
FWIW, I don't understand from what you wrote what she was asking for. Did she mean bring them one or two flights up to the apartment?
Do we agree that going north is traveling up to some location? And... I heard an interview with an American who has lived in Israel for fifteen years. He loves coming to America, because it's nice to visit "the old country"!