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

cement or concrete
Yet in the pre-Christian era the original Celts left traces of their civilisation in
various places across continental Europe, in Switzerland, Spain and in France. The
people of present-day Brittany still speak a Celtic language: Breton which is closely
related to Welsh. Together they make up the larger body of Celtic speakers (over
one million), whereas the speakers of Scottish and Irish Gaelic total between one
and two hundred thousand, according to estimates in the Cambridge Encyclopedia
of Language (1997).
The spelling Keltic reflects the original Greek name for the Celts: Keltoi. It has
been more used by scholars than writers at large, and serves to distinguish the
ancient nomadic people from their modern descendants.
cement or concrete These words are sometimes interchanged, as when a
concrete mixer is referred to as a cement mixer. Cement is of course the bonding
agent in concrete, although it is the steel reinforcing or crushed stones which give
concrete its strength, not the cement. Using the word cement instead of concrete
may be seen as an everyday instance of meronymy: referring to something by means
of one of its constituents. (See further under metonymy.)
censor or censure As verbs, these seem to overlap because both involve
strong negative judgements. They differ in that censor implies official control
of information which is deemed dangerous for the public, and results in the
proscription or banning of such things as books, movies or news items. It is
a preventive measure, whereas censure means voicing public criticism of things
already done, as when members of parliament are censured in a formal motion. As
nouns the two words go their separate ways, censor as an agent word “one who
censors”, and censure as the abstract noun for “strongly voiced criticism”.
centennial or centenary Some Australians worry more than they need
about which of these words to use. In the US, Canada and New Zealand, they
serve as both nouns and adjectives, and there are no restrictions on which you
use when referring to a one hundredth year celebration. However in British usage
there has been a reluctance to use centennial as a noun, which probably stems
from a note in the Oxford Dictionary that centenary had the better pedigree for
use as a noun; as well as Fowler’s emphasis on the analogous forms of bicentenary,
tercentenary, quatercentenary etc. and sesquicentenary (150 years). The argument
has its force if one is looking from one centennial celebration to the next, but
otherwise the enormous gap in time between the actual celebrations makes it
relatively unimportant.
center or centre See under -re/-er.
centi- This prefix means “one hundredth”, as in centimetre, centisecond and
other words of measurement used within the metric system (see further under
metrication and number prefixes). Yet centi- is derived from the Latin word
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