“Where do you stay?” vs “Where do you live?”

I am not a native speaker of English and I was having a casual conversation with my friends in the US. I asked them, “Where do you stay?” (which is pretty common in India, as far as I know) for which they gave me a surprised look and told me that people generally don’t use … Read more

Grammar — Nor without Neither but with Non

Is this sentence grammatically correct: Non necessarily convex nor simply connected Answer Non necessarily Is probably a typo, and should be Not necessarily Other than that, the sentence is fine, especially if you add a comma before "nor". You can use "nor" without "neither" to connect two negative sentences. I haven’t travelled to Canada, nor … Read more

Does “prioritary” exist outside technical texts?

As a non-native speaker, I’m struggling to express correctly the sense of priority of a given population in a sentence. Is it correct to refer to “prioritary cities in the scope of the XYZ policy”, meaning “cities over which priority has been given in the scope…”? I don’t think so. I’ve found several occurrences of … Read more

There is no activity since a to b or No activity since a to b?

It’s used in the app’s interface. I wonder if omitting there is/there are is not a grammatical mistake and sounds native (I’m not a native speaker). So, which do you think will sound better in a web app? There is no activity since a to b No activity since a to b Answer Since is … Read more

Are there any words whose spelling was deliberately changed to make them non-offensive?

I am looking for some examples of words that, possibly due to their non-Latin origin, would have sounded offensive if they went through the English language rules. For example, if a specialty Bohemian medical practice sounded like “rap” then people practicing it would be “rappists,” like psychologists who practice psychology. Since that’s too close to … Read more

American and British English Spelling

I am a non-native English speaker. I was taught British English in my school days, but now I work in American English. The problem is whenever I try to write English there is a mix up of American and British spellings. I tried to correct this problem by learning the American English spelling whenever I … Read more