The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage - Noel's ESL ...

eratio
decidendi See under obiter dictum.
ravage or ravish Both words refer to powerful and usually destructive forces.
Ravage is used when destruction is spread over a wide area by an impersonal or
natural force such as fire or flood. Ravish has a specifically human subject and
object, and means “seize, carry off by force” or “rape”. Those distinct meanings
are there, even when the two words come close, as in: The landscape was ravaged
by napalm, and enemy soldiers ravished the local women.
Surprisingly then, ravish can also mean “overwhelm with delight”, as in He
found her green eyes ravishing. In fact this meaning has coexisted with the others
for centuries, being first recorded in the fourteenth. Yet the word can rarely be
taken at face value. Somehow there’s an element of hyperbole in ravish, keeping
the dark and destructive elements of its meaning at bay.
raveled or ravelled For the choice between these, see -l/-ll-.
re This Latin tag is used in official letter writing to identify the subject under
discussion. It abbreviates the Latin phrase in re “in the matter of”, and is not
therefore a clipped form of regarding, as is sometimes thought. It often prefaces
the subject line in a business letter, as in:
Dear Editor
re: Schedule for production of the annual report
We would propose that ...
In that position it’s often set in lower case, and followed by a colon. However re
can also appear in upper case and without a colon, as in the following:
Dear Editor
Re the schedule for the annual report, we would propose that ...
Re is too well established to need italics, and can even be used informally to replace
concerning or regarding, asinlast night’s discussion re the family holiday. But
in everyday communication, re still seems a little awkward with its overtones of
business and faintly pretentious Latin character. For more about the conventions
of commercial letter writing, see under commercialese and Appendix VII.
re- Drawn originally from Latin, this prefix means “back” or “again”. The first
meaning is there in words such as: rebound, recall, recover, repress and resound; the
second is in: rebuild, refill, rejoin, reprint and revive. Yet in many of the French
loanwords in which it occurs, its meaning cannot be disentangled from the word
itself, witness:
receive refuse remember repeat resign reveal
In modern English words formed with re-, the meaning is always “again”, a point
which comes up when we compare the new or ad hoc formations with older ones,
for example re-create/recreate, re-mark/remark and re-serve/reserve. The hyphen
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