No. "Advise" is a verb and "advice" is a noun. Furthermore, they are not pronounced the same way. The S in "advise" is soft (or "voiced" as we linguists say), so it sounds like "advize." The C in "advice" is a "voiceless" S. This is the same as the difference between "as" and "ass," "laws" and "loss," "lose and "loose," "graze" and "grace," etc.
It is used, I assure you. If someone is always looking to unfairly gain an advantage over someone, and it looks personal, one might ask "What's your problem with him? Do you have a vendetta against him?" They won't mean it as in "do you have a blood feud against him?" but more a question of whether there is something they are looking for revenge for.
slugfest = A fight marked by an extended exchange of heavy blows. Why slug (Any of various terrestrial gastropod mollusks having a slow-moving slimy elongated body with no shell or with a flat rudimentary shell on or under the skin, usually found in moist habitats)? Slug's body is soft, can not be "heavy blow".
It's not from the critter ("slug", a slimy critter related to snails, but without the shell). It's from the very, "to slug" which means to hit hard. Older brothers will slug their younger siblings. So a slug-fest is a 'festival' of slugging hard at someone.
unusual usage. it implies encircling so nothing escapes. the government allowed the money to be spent on multiple purposes, and did not keep it contained to one purpose.
Journalists are fond of hyperbole, the use of words and phrases that make something seem more important, dangerous, interesting, etc., than it really is. So they might write, "the President has a vendetta against the Senator from California," when they only mean that he consistently vetoes the bills he wrote. He's not really going to kill him, "Ring" is used as a verb, meaning to completely surround something, or a group of things or people, so thoroughly that they have no chance of escaping. So a ring fence is simply a fence that is very carefully constructed to make sure that whatever is inside it stays inside. Obviously, in this case it is being used metaphorically. As Walter noted, there are two words with the same spelling and pronunciation: slug. They are actually the same word, but most people don't realize this because the meanings are so different. The original meaning was a person who moves or thinks very slowly, and was then applied to the animal, who also moves very slowly and doesn't seem to be very smart. Before long it was generalized to things that move slowly because they're heavy, but then the "slow" aspect was lost as the word came to be used for a bullet. It became a verb, meaning to hit someone with a large heavy object, but now (at least in the USA) it has become more specialized and usually means, specifically, to hit someone with your fist.
I believe overarching is one of those words where a literal interpretation is appropriate. I think it means things like the main or most important issue.
The literal meaning is just what it looks like: the formation of an arch that completely covers something, or completely crosses it from one end (or side) to the other. A bridge that carries traffic from one side of a river to the other is a perfect example of overarching. In a dense forest, the trees might have overarching branches that completely block the view of the sky. The word eventually came to be used metaphorically: to encompass or overshadow everything, or everything else. The city's overarching need is to eliminate the corruption in the municipal government. Until that happens, there will be no progress.
yes. in physics (older, English System, not Metric) a Slug is a mass that has the mass of a 32 pound weight; or under earth's gravity of 32 feet/second/second; one slug has a weight of 32 pounds. It is the basic unit of Mass in the English system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(mass)
I see. In America, scientists use the CGS (centimeter/gram/second) or MKS (meter/kilogram/second) system while non-scientists use what we call the "Imperial" or "British" system (foot/pound/second). Apparently, over there they have yet another system, something like RSF (rod/slug/fortnight). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Well, the "English System" is/was used in the US, and I learned it (in California) and the Metric (cgs/mKs) concurrently, so I'm proficient in both. The "English System" used quaint units like BTU (British Thermal Unit), Feet, Pounds, Inches, PSI (or Pounds per square inch), etc. I'm sure you use it today, as your car reads in miles/hour, not km/hour, and you tank up with gallons, not liters, etc. Lots of conversion tables available. It is actually simpler in some methods (inch, 1/2 inch,. 1/4 inch, 1/8 inch 1/16 inch sockets, etc., scaling down by halves, rather than incrementally), but for most purposes the common metric system is easier; though not widely used in the US other than for science labs.
The word "course" has several related meanings. These include: A customary manner of procedure A regular or natural order of eventsThe phrase "a matter of course" means "the way we expect things to happen," as in "The weather got warmer as winter gave way to spring, so as a matter of course, the snow soon melted." "Of course" is simply a shortened form of this phrase. If someone asks you, "Are you going to play tennis on Saturday morning as you always do?" and then you respond, "Of course I will," you're saying, "It's a matter of course that I will."
Because eating your hat is an uncomfortable thing to do and not something you would normally want to do. The idiom basically means that you are so confident in your claim that if you are wrong then you will perform this task. Why this particular idiom, of eating your hat, was first spoken, or why it has stuck, I don't know, but it may have stuck because of the imagery of someone literally trying to eat their hat: it is a rather silly and foolish think to attempt.
