synonymsword-meaning
I am reading Norman Lewis's book Word power made easy. At one place the author says,
"Words that describe all kinds and sorts of people…"
Here if "kind" and "sort" mean the same thing then the above sentence literallg means,
"Words that describe all kinds and kinds of people.."
This is quite confhsing. Please explain.
"a reply of sorts" means that although it could be classified (sorted) as a reply, it would have been an inferior one. Kind could not be substituted.
It is a more formal writing style, yes.
It means that although they did see the countryside, it wasn't in the same way that someone "touring the countryside and visiting picturesque sites. . ." would have. So in a (the literal) sense they did see the countryside, but in the (generally accepted) sense, they did not.
"having been placed" would be a possible substitute.
The definition
obnoxious (adj.) very rude, offensive, or unpleasant : an obnoxious child; an obnoxious habit
is almost correct, but as commonly used, obnoxious also implies that the offensiveness is difficult to ignore. An obnoxious child is not just rude, but loudly or aggressively so. An obnoxious color or combination of colors is unpleasant but also intense or bright like the way the building in the linked article was painted:
I would rewrite the definition as
obnoxious (adj.) very rude, offensive, or unpleasant in a way that is difficult to ignore: an obnoxious child; an obnoxious habit
I don't know if I feel hatefulness toward an obnoxious person - I think it's too strong a word. I would describe it as strong dislike mixed with annoyance.
Best Answer
Kind and sort (and variety, and type, etc.) are names for groupings (typically of noun phrases),
according to some shared criterion.
Etymologically, kind is a noun from the Proto-Indo-European root *gen- 'give birth to, be born, offspring', along with words like king, kin, gonad, and gentle, while sort is a verb from sors, sortis- ‘lot, condition.’ It refers to the common activity of sorting objects (and by extension, events) and features in many idioms and phrasal verbs.
From a kind/sort of cookie to kind/sort of a cookie is not much of a jump in meaning, but the grammar is different for kind and type, and for them alone. Sort and kind have each developed quantifier-like idiomatic extensions with of (sort of and kind of), both meaning 'close to; approximately'. And these constructions can modify anything at all, even verbs. These are both so common that they have their own eye-dialect spelling contractions -- sorta and kinda.
Naturally, when you're dealing with classifiers and other operators, it matters where you put them. In the sentences above, kinda and sorta can go before mad, meaning 'somewhat mad', or they can go before got mad, meaning 'did something that was close to getting mad'. These may in fact refer to precisely the same behavior, depending on the speaker's judgement about others' emotions.
This extension, by the way, doesn't happen with type, model, or variety:
So in this regard, kind and sort are synonymous.