From the foregoing, "chat up" seems indeed to be close to a synonym for it. I must say I had never associated it with any physical contact, just talk aimed at flattering and hence some form of seduction or persuasion, not necessarily sexual.
1. I plan to venture into the business of selling mobile phones and need a starting capital of $50,000. 2. My mother is talking to her friend in/on the telephone. For both sentences, which preposition is correct?
I've never heard or read the word to mean anything like that at all. But since one of the senses is "to flatter," in the sense of ingratiating yourself to someone who might be able to loan you money or help you launch a project, I can see how the "flattering" could be stretched to mean "making time" ("pursuing a romance"--probably an Americanism). We know how much American slang and British slang differ. Who doesn't remember the embarrassing difference between the British idiom "knock you up," which means, literally, to knock on your door in preparation to take you somewhere, and the American idiom, which means to get you pregnant?
That is correct. "Capital" is a mass noun like food, water, love, peace, etc. It does not take the definite article. "I need starting capital," not "I need a starting capital." If you see the phrase, "a capital," it refers to the capital city of a state or country. As the Doctor explained, it's always "on the telephone. En is the French word for "in." If you see an expression beginning with en, it is almost certainly French. It's also the Spanish word for "in," but French idioms are much more common in English than Spanish idioms. What a strange question. If you see the phrase "I'll be arriving in pants," would you consider changing it to "inpants"???
What a strange answer! I am sure you are aware, FR, that many words that are commonly paired may, after a time, be joined with a hyphen. After a further passage of time the hyphen itself may disappear, leaving a single word. En suite is now appearing, in some instances, as en-suite. I have not specifically seen it presented as ensuite, but I am confident it has been so represented. Therefore, there is nothing whatsoever strange about the question - unless the person asking it is fluent in French and English. I think we know that is not the case here, or the question would not have been asked.
My spell-checker is constantly begging me to use hyphens instead of separate words or conjoined words.
Of course. But for a non-native speaker who is still asking a lot of basic questions about English, this is not the time to start teaching him to be creative. Furthermore, he wasn't asking about hyphenating "en-suite." He was asking about smashing it into a single word--one which, by the way, is NOT in the dictionary. Then you'd better replace your spell-checker with one of higher quality--especially if you ever intend to write for a living.
My guess that this is just a difference between UK and USA English. I'm not an expert here, but I get the clear impression that UK English uses hyphens in many cases where the USA does not. Words like able-bodied, born-again, saddle-bag, etc. So it could just be that he does indeed have a high-quality one. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
We use the hyphens in "able-bodied" and "born-again," but "saddlebag" is a single word. Hyphens tend to be squeezed out of words over time. "Saddlebag" goes back 250 years, so it's earned its unhyphenated status. (I tried to write "unhyphenation," but the spell-checker insists that this is not a real word. -- Same goes for "high-quality": it's two words with no hyphen.)
Nor is it a time to be patronising him. Your post could have been interpreted that way. Perhaps I was unclear. En-suite is now an accepted variant of En Suite. It can be observed that any hyphenated word pairing will sometimes be combined into a single word. This may be - currently - erroneous, but it happens. Since it happens, Saint could very well have encountered it in his reading. Therefore it is of value to worn Saint of this practice.
No, much stronger than that, it means "reason for existing", and it has a circumflex over the e: Raison d'être
