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Ben Kovitz's user avatar
Ben Kovitz's user avatar
Ben Kovitz's user avatar
Ben Kovitz
  • Member for 10 years, 6 months
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About

If you don't know the meaning of a word, and you read a dictionary definition, then you probably still won't know the meaning of the word.

If you memorize 10,000 rules of English grammar, you still won't know English grammar.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cal Poly Humboldt. Ph.D. in cognitive science and computer science. Occasional Wikipedian.

Native speaker of American English (Midwestern).

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125
How do you say 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 in words?
Jun 23, 2015
answer
76
Why do people, incorrectly, begin a sentence with the word "But"?
Mar 8, 2015
answer
63
How do native speakers 'guess' the pronunciation of the letters in a word they see for the first time?
Jun 12, 2015
answer
53
'Ask away' - what does 'away' mean?
May 26, 2016
answer
49
"When you Frankenstein a team together..." - Is "Frankenstein" a new verb?
Oct 23, 2019
answer
44
Is there any difference between "temporary" and "provisional"?
May 30, 2017
answer
38
Difference between continuous and simple
Mar 24, 2021
answer
37
"The books arrived TO you" or "The books arrived AT you"?
Mar 29, 2021
answer
36
What is the meaning of Five Thousand and No/100 Dollars in a contract?
Oct 9, 2015
answer
34
"We missed the bus, which made us late for school" - erroneous use of "which"?
Jan 26, 2015
Top Meta posts
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How helpful is it to add "Hope this is helpful!" to an ELL answer?
9
Bullying trolls, lack of moderators
8
Traditional grammar vs. "contemporary grammar" as a vocabulary for talking about grammar with EFL learners
8
Why ONLY some questions asking lyrics meaning are off topic and not all?
8
Which sorts of math questions are on-topic?
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141
What is Google Translate good for?
132
What is this strange sentence by Walt Whitman?
65
How do you return from a function early in Clojure?
45
What is the mathematical value of children learning and being tested on Roman numerals?
30
A story of a king who wanted to simplify Latin grammar