Help with English

Entertainers and sound engineers use "mike" as a contraction of "microphone." For reasons I don't understand, the word is now often spelled "mic" instead of "mike." To perform a microphone check is to ensure that it is turned on and connected to the P.A. (public address) system and that the volume is set to the proper level. If these guys yelled "mic check" during an event as they approached the stage, they were pretending to be stagehands interrupting the proceedings in order to resolve a technical problem. This may have fooled and/or confused people for a few seconds, even the organizers, giving them enough time to stage their prank in front of an audience and briefly get away with it.

Liberals support gay rights, conservatives oppose them. Like the rest of the world, the USA is slowly becoming more liberal about civil rights and human rights. Official discrimination against LGBT people (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) is almost (but not quite) completely illegal. In private life It is rare in our big cities and slowly becoming less common in rural areas. Gay marriage is now legal in several states. The major opposition to it comes from the more conservative religions (such as the Catholics, Mormons and evangelicals) as well as ethnic minorities such as Afro- and Mexican-Americans who should be ashamed of themselves since their communities suffered hatred and discrimination for generations.

The Republican Party is the conservative party, so it is they who are trying to hold back the tide and prevent granting civil rights to gays, most especially the right to marry. A major plank in their party platform is to reverse the progress that gays have made. So it's understandable why these two guys would have interrupted the proceedings at a campaign meeting for Santorum, a Republican presidential candidate, and it's understandable why the people in the audience would have reacted with hostility. Twenty years ago they would have shouted rude epithets like "queer" or "faggot," but today they might be arrested. So for lack of a better slogan they settled for shouting "USA." (I can write those words because this is the Linguistics subforum and our purpose is to study words. I strongly recommend that you don't ever use them yourself, certainly not among Americans.)

You still haven't learned to use the internet as a resource. You need to become more adept with it if you expect to have a successful life in the 21st century. Type her name into Google (or whichever search engine your browser uses) and you'll see ten photographs of her and her biography on Linkedin. She's a news reporter in the Chicago region. She seems to be young and just starting out, and has recently had assignments covering agricultural business.

Savannah is a noun meaning a grassland: no tree canopy to block sunlight so animals can graze on the rich grass. It's also the name of a well-known city in state of Georgia. It's not customarily used as a name so it's reasonable that you could not guess her gender. However, in English (as in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian), 99% of names ending in -A or -AH are feminine. There are a few ancient Hebrew masculine names from the Bible ending in -a or -ah, such as Asa and Isaiah, but these are very uncommon today. "A" is now so thoroughly established as a gender identifier that it would be very strange for an American to give his son a name ending in A or AH.

Siegelbauer is obviously a German name, meaning a person who makes seals: the old-fashioned kind used for sealing a message with wax to prove that it hadn't been opened during transit, and bearing the symbol of the person who wrote it to prove that it was authentic. S at the beginning of a German word is pronounced Z, so in English-speaking countries people with these names sometimes change the S to a Z so we'll pronounce them right. For example, Ziggy was the nickname for Sigmund, which in German is pronounced Zigmunt, back a few generations ago when that name was much more common than it is today.

As Xotica implies, changing the S at the beginning of a German name to Z was more common among Jewish people from Germany than among Gentile people, so I would agree this suggests that her family was Jewish. But this is only a guess that could be wrong.

I think he means that Siegelbauer is a German name, and like many German names (for example Mueller and Klein) it has been taken by Jewish families as well as Gentile families. My father's paternal grandfather was Jewish when he lived in Europe so my surname falls into that category. In the USA almost everyone who has our name is descended from Jewish ancestors (or in my great-grandfather's case one Jewish ancestor who quickly assimilated and stopped being Jewish when he arrived in America), whereas in Europe most of the people with our name are from Gentile families.

In America, any family that's been here for two generations or more probably does not have "pure blood" from any single country or ethnic group, so we all have "mixed blood." That's why our country is called a melting pot. Even our president, who is universally regarded as "black," had one parent of African ancestry and one of European descent.

All we now about this lady is that she is a model who poses for professional photographers. That means she is attractive and knows how to pose. A ring girl has to present herself in motion, which is a different skill.

 

My father's paternal grandparents were members of the Jewish community in Europe, but they assimilated when they came to the USA. In Europe my surname is almost exclusively borne by Gentile families, but in the USA it seems to be carried only by Jewish people, or Melting Pot Americans like me with a Jewish ancestor.

Like many young Americans searching for a culture they never really had, I took a class in Yiddish forty years ago and added it to my trove of linguistic lore. The professor's name was Ziegelbaum, also respelled with a Z.

I learned a bunch of cool folk songs too.

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It's humorous that their "heritage" language is Yiddish, an offshoot of German, the language of their least favorite host country. For centuries the Jews picked up the local language everywhere they settled, and that was one of the reasons they were so successful: better communication. Then when they picked up German they started taking Yiddish with them to other countries. I don't know if this is still true, but there was once a community of extremely Orthodox people in Israel who believed it was blasphemy to use Hebrew in everyday speech, so they continued to speak Yiddish, even there.

I don't go out looking for it, but yes, I enjoy it.

No. As Sarkus explained, when a pot of soup or stew is "simmering" it means that it is at boiling temperature, but you can't tell by looking because the surface is calm. "Simmering tension" means that it is not yet visible, but it's getting ready to explode.

It means, literally, to lock something down for security. (We also say "lock up." As I've mentioned many times before, English prepositions have no logic. Their only purpose is to make it hard for foreigners to learn our language.) To lock down a prison means to put each prisoner in his own cell and lock the door, so they can't interact with each other and organize to cause trouble.

To lock down a whole town means to send in so many soldiers or police that people are confined to their homes and can't move about freely. A curfew is similar, but is usually only in effect when it's dark. Also, if it's called a curfew instead of a lockdown it means that the population is cooperative and don't need a batallion of armed officers to enforce it.

A ring is an enclosure. To be ringed by anything means that there are enough of them that you are completely enclosed and cannot get away. To be ringed by policemen probably does not mean that they are literally standing shoulder to shoulder, but they're close enough to each other that you'd be shot, or at least captured, before you could escape between them.

Especially in a setting like this. The men up in the higher rows can't see their faces very clearly. They can see their body shapes and the way they move.

If you're looking for logic and simplicity in language, please tell us all why the Chinese word for "thing" is "east-west."

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