Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.

[EX Q]: Is there an etymological link between medicine and the Ancient Greek () meaning laugh or smile (as seen in Book 1 of the Iliad)? I hope this is the correct place to ask this. I wondered if there was a link due to the phrase 'laughter is the best medicine'. I also wondered if linked to the belief in Ancient Greece (eg, at Epidaurus Theatre) that laughter and theatre had an effect on well-being and health (there was a healing centre next to the theatre). I've looked briefly at various websites, most of whom mention the Latin origin, but I was interested in seeing whether there might be a different route anyone knew of.
[EX A]: No, there is no link. There are three main aspects to this, and all three of them agree fairly conclusively that there is precious little possibility that Greek has anything to do with medicine through the proverb 'laughter is the best medicine': there's the well-established Latin origin of the word medicine, the Greek verb itself, and the English proverb. The Latin origin As Josh's answer states, it is well-established that the word medicine comes to us through French from Latin, based ultimately on the verb medeor, which in Latin means only 'heal, cure, remedy, amend, correct, relieve'. Further back, that verb comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *med-, which originally meant 'measure, limit, consider, weight out, etc.'. Its meaning represents a semantic shift in that root which was specific to the Italic languages, however. The Greek cognates to the Latin verb (active and middle ), thus mean, respectively, 'protect, rule over' (representing a semantic shift specific to Greek) and 'provide for, think on, be mindful of, bethink one of'. Of the Latin verb, de Vaan says: The meaning of medeor is based on a semantic shift from 'measure' to 'distribute a cure, heal'. For a PIE stative verb (as assumed by LIV) or a frequentative, the e-grade in med- would be surprising. If the intermediate phase was 'to judge' (cf. meditor), medeor and its e-grade may have been grafted on the noun *medo(s)- 'judgement, law' (> modus) seen in U[mbrian] mers, mers 'law'. We can then regard it as a stative verb *med-e- 'to be a judge' > 'to be a healer, to heal' which was formed within Italic. The three essential things to note here are: that this sense of the base verb and its form were formed within the Italic branch of Indo-European languages; that the same root is attested in Greek with a different meaningand also a different form to the verb ; that the phonemic/phonetic form of the word 'medicine' in English, /md(i)sn/, is somewhat coincidental and bears no relation to its Latin forebearer. Medicus, the immediate ancestor, would be /medikus/ with a /k/ sound, like medical rather than medicine. The change from /k/ to /s/ did not happen until some time in Vulgar Latin, around a thousand years after the Iliad was en vogue. And of course the derivational base of Latin medicus is a verb that doesn't have any consonant there at all: the consonant is part of the adjectivising suffix, not the root. So the only thing left in common with the English word medicine is the stem med-. The Greek verb The verb form you're asking about here, , does not really mean 'laugh or smile' as such, but rather 'he/she/it smiled': it is the third person singular aorist form of the verb 'smile'. Moreover, it's an extended variant of that form: the base form is , without the ephelcystic nu, which gets rid of the n in medicine. Get rid of the further conditioning that this in an inflected aorist form (which very rarely form the basis for creating nouns), and you also lose the /s/, since that is the aorist marker. You then, again, have only a verbal root in common, this time meid-. Of course, that immediately raises the problem that meid- and med- are not the same thing: both English and Greek (and Latin, for that matter) have both, and they are not interchangeable. Greek words with -ei- do not normally end up yielding English // (that is, a short 'eh' sound). Even if that weren't enough to reject the theory, however, there is the fact that the Greek verb also has quite a satisfactory etymology: it is one of several extensions to the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)meih2-, whose base meaning is quite simply 'smile, be glad, laugh, be mirthful'. The extension that has survived in Greek here has a *-d-, while others have an *-r- or an *-l-. The reason the Greek verb begins with an m is quite simply that initial *sm- regularly loses its *s; the same happens with *sn-, which becomes just *n-.1 The same root is also behind the Latin adjective mirus (with the *-r- extension) and its derivatives (including words like miracle and admire): Latin underwent the same simplification of the initial cluster as Greek did. (The meaning of mirus 'wonderful, marvellous, amazing' represents another semantic shift that only happened within the Italic languages, or perhaps just within Latin itself.) In contrast, the Germanic languages were quite happy to keep *sm- unchanged, and the *smeih2- root also shows up as verbs here, indeed with both *-r- and *-l- extensions. The modern English forms of those verbs are smirk and smile. So with all that, the only part of medicine and that ends up being actually comparable is the m and the d. Not much, especially when you consider that both the proposed ancestors hereviz., Latin medeor and Greek have cognates in the opposite language that don't fit the form. The English proverb Finally, there is the question of the proverb that 'laughter is the best medicine'. While I don't think anyone knows for sure how old that particular turn of phrase is, it seems unlikely that it is as old as the Iliad. Proverbs 17:22 states that: A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. which is rather close to being the same sentiment. But it still seems fairly far-fetched as links goespecially when you consider that, as far as I can figure out, the classical Greek translation of that particular place used an entirely different word (my emphasis): , . The verb used for being cheerful here is 'cheer, make glad, be merry'; and the word loosely translatable as 'medicine' is , which literally means 'cause to be in a good condition'. So the Greek version really says,'A cheerful heart makes you in good condition', which is a fair distance from 'laughter is the best medicine'. Notes: If we're being precise, the initial s in this root is a so-called s-mobile, which means that even in Proto-Indo-European itself there seems to have been some vacillation between whether it was there or not. It showed up in some dialects/forms/cases/contexts, but not in others. That isn't particularly important in this case, though, since we're mostly dealing with two languages where it would have been lost anyway. There is at least some indirect evidence that both Greek and Latin did have the *s in this root originally: If it is correct that the word cosmis on the Duenos inscription is the same word, with the same meaning, as Classical Latin comis 'kind, gracious, affable, elegant', and that it represents an earlier *kom-smi- 'who has a smile', then the Early Latin form shows there was an original s there. If the Epic Greek form is an actual, historically justifiable form (rather than just a spurious variant to make it fit the metre by doubling the consonant), then it almost certainly represents *filo-hmeidas from earlier *filo-smeid-as, with the (in the compound not) initial *s.

[EX Q]: How can I explain to people that the phrase off of is grammatically incorrect? I've heard this phrase used a lot, especially by Americans (though they aren't the only ones). In my understanding, off of should usually be replaced by off, as in, I took the book off the shelf as opposed to I took the book off of the shelf Am I wrong? Or is there perhaps some simple way I can explain this to most people?.
[EX A]: I don't know how you can explain to people in general that it's grammatically incorrect, but here is one idea: when you go to a James Brown tribute concert and the singer says 'Get up offa that thing' what you could do is to trounce the security guards, climb on to the stage, pounce onto the singer, grab the microphone and say 'In fact you should be saying not 'get up offa that thing' but 'get up off that thing' since 'offa' is grammatically incorrect.' I'm sure everyone will thank you for your grammatical corrections. Being serious for a moment though, it's very difficult to decide what is or is not 'grammatically correct'. E.g. in the UK we say 'outside my house' but US people often say 'outside of my house'. How can you actually decide which of these two is grammatically correct? Unfortunately it's not possible since English grammar is not a science like physics but merely a description of what people actually do, and that has changed very significantly over the years. If I was teaching someone English I would definitely say 'off' is correct and 'off of' is wrong, but this kind of decision is based on intuition, based on the usages of educated native speakers.

[EX Q]: Should I write it like this? Or perhaps like this? Should I write it like this? or perhaps like this? What about after an exclamation mark or semicolon?.
[EX A]:
Did the sentence end after the question mark? Yes. Then you need a capital letter to start the new sentence, just as usual. No. Then the question mark shouldn't have been there, since it ends a sentence. Right, I should expand on that rather than just be a grumpy old man. The capitalization rule that we care about here is that the first word of a sentence starts with a capital letter, so the question is really about what ends a sentence. The answer to that is easy: terminal punctuation, i.e. a full stop (or period if you're American), question mark or exclamation mark. There's a visual clue in that '?' and '!' are decorated full stops; you just have to remember that a colon (':') isn't really a decorated full stop, not that you'd ever know by looking at it. Colons, semicolons and commas aren't terminal punctuation, so they don't end a sentence and so don't force the next letter to be a capital. It may be a capital letter for some other reason such as being the start of a proper name, but not because it is starting a sentence. There are exceptions to this rule, occasions when '?' and '!' become non-terminal punctuation. The most obvious is in quoted speech: if the speaker asks a question or makes an exclamation, the '?' or '!' doesn't have to be terminal if the sentence carries on after the quote. 'Should I write it like this?' he asked. 'Or perhaps like this?' The other class of exception is for what are probably really parenthetical comments. If you have a short phrase that you could have put aside in parentheses or dashes, then a question mark or exclamation mark can be used at the end of that phrase without ending the sentence. Be sparing with this. It looks wrong at a first read, and engenders the sort of argument I had with Jason in the comments below! Should I write it like this, or abracadabra! like this? Going back to the examples, and adding a few more for fun: Should I write it like this? Or perhaps like this? Should I write it like this? or perhaps like this? Should I write it like this, or perhaps like that? 'Should I write it like this?' he asked, 'or perhaps like that?' Example 2 with the lowercase 'or' is just plain wrong. Crusty old grammarians who disapprove of starting sentences with conjunctions may frown at example 1 all they like, but it's a perfectly acceptable fragmentary sentence. Whether it's the right answer or not is another question entirely. Example 1 makes the point that the questions are distinct, though they are strongly linked otherwise the whole structure wouldn't work. Example 3 on the other hand emphasizes that the two questions are options in a common situation, as well as reflecting a different way of saying them. That is obvious in this case because the two questions really are tightly coupled alternatives. However, consider the following: Are the lights green? Or is the switch up? Are the lights green, or is the switch up? Both of these examples imply that the state of the lights and the state of the switch are related somehow. Version 2 couples them more tightly; I would usually assume (without more context) that either this is the same question being asked in two different ways (i.e. that the switch being up should cause the lights to be green), or that they are an exhaustive list of possibilities (either the switch is up or the lights are green, but not both or neither). This isn't an absolute rule, but it is quite strongly implied. Example 4 is also wrong, though it has a better disguise. If you unwrap the quotes, what you get is: Should I write it like this? or perhaps like this? which is our duff example 2 back again. What you actually want is one of: 'Should I write it like this?' he asked. 'Or perhaps like this?' (i.e. example 1) 'Should I write it like this,' he asked, 'or perhaps like that? (i.e. example 3) depending this time on how much of a break there is supposed to be in the middle of what was said. But speech-marking is a topic for another question :-) Exclamation marks work just like question marks for this purpose! Semicolons don't; they end a clause, not a sentence.

