So, my brother is watching on tv a vote a in the American Congress. He says that the members are asked to vote with yea/nay (I have heard that from the Chamber of Commons in the UK as …

Is "yay or nay" an acceptable alternative to "yea or nay"? I have seen it several times in recent weeks, enough to make me wonder whether it is an emerging usage or just a common typo.

Jan 31, 2012 · The phrase that's spoken when someone is hand-wringing about a thorny problem. Speaker One: Uh-oh -- we have to reformat ALL THE DOCUMENTS! Speaker Two: Aye Yai …

I have heard expressions like "It was yay big" or "It was yay by yay." a couple of times now, always accompanied by a gesture indicating the size of something. Does anybody know where …

Dec 13, 2010 · Which one is it really: hear hear or here here? Where does the saying really come from?

Jan 3, 2013 · I am curious as to why "nay" replaces the simple unequivocal "no" in the context of voting. My research in Merriam-Webster tells me that "nay" means "no" (not the other way …

Sep 27, 2016 · Both expressions are responses to a question or comment from a third party. They are both saying that the answer should be obvious to the questioner. The "but" just adds …

Wikipedia has a decent article on past tenses that explains a lot of this. To summarise: "They didn't start yet" is the negative form of the simple past, "They started." In the positive form it …

Some people consider hey to be an inappropriate greeting ("Hay is for horses"), but among those who do not, I wouldn't say that hey yourself has any inherently negative connotation. Its …

Looking up the etymology of 'egad' I saw that it is an archaic, euphemistic form of 'O God' or 'Ye God.' I assume this was a one off evolution, and the 'how' was some idiosyncratic shift in the