Re: correct English usage

On Tuesday 03 April 2012 15:09:50 Pierre Frenkiel wrote:
On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Kelly Clowers wrote:
They are not wrong per say, but only the first definition you mention
(anatomy) is in widespread use these days (which is why it said
"chiefly").

Is that specific to American English, or is it also true for
British English, Canadian English, ...?

It is certainly true for English English. It would simply not be used in teh
way that you used it.



Paul's statement was much more stronger:
this is the wrong word in English to describe the relation between
Squeeze and Lenny. Maybe OK in some other European language, but not
in English.

I agree with Paul. It is simply not acceptable in practice.

If you say "posterior" people's first thought will be "ass".

but in the given sentence, posterior is clearly an adjective?

Which yet again, is not a correct usage in modern idiom of that word.

That happens all the time with dictionary-based translations, by
the way. It can be very hard to tell if a definition is really used
much in practice.

Then, for people whose native language is not English, in some cases
the only way to find the right word seems to be try and error.

Or accept the word of educated native speakers.

Note that the WordReference English Thesaurus © 2012 gave the most
common meaning for posterior in second place, and that it was nowhere
mentioned that the time related meaning was deprecated.

It isn't deprecated because no-one would use it in the first place.

Is there a
dictionnary where this kind of information would be available?

In general there is a tendency in modern American English to
use rather simple words or descriptive phrases made of simple
words rather than a single very precise but less well known word.

Again, is that specific to American English?

No. Though the English are a bit prone to being pretentious. I was taught
at school that where an Anglo-Saxon word applied, it should be used in
preference to a Latin one. (In "Latin" I am including French.)

Lisi



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