[The Godfather]

What's the correct expression:
"Breeming with people", or "teeming with people"?

[phantomdragonz]

WTF is breeming?

I have never heard that, teeming with people I have heard of.

Even the spellchecker does not like breeming.

-Zach

[ghporter]

"Teaming with...." is the appropriate term, indicating a situation where something has lots of active content. An example would be "at 11:00 PM on Christmas Eve, the mall was teeming with shoppers."

"Brimming with..." implies something that is not merely full, evoking the sense that the contents are at the "brim" of the container, but going beyond the mere point that the item is full. There is no sense that the issue includes activity. "It was a soup brimming with warm goodness." is an example of this usage.

[iLikebeer]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

"Teaming with...." is the appropriate term, indicating a situation where something has lots of active content. An example would be "at 11:00 PM on Christmas Eve, the mall was teeming with shoppers."

"Brimming with..." implies something that is not merely full, evoking the sense that the contents are at the "brim" of the container, but going beyond the mere point that the item is full. There is no sense that the issue includes activity. "It was a soup brimming with warm goodness." is an example of this usage.

teem - definition of teem by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

"Teaming with...."

That's an unfortunate typo, especially considering you have the correct homonym two lines down.

[turtle777]

Pfff, we're beaming right past that.

-t

[Oisín]

^^ Well, the two words are closely related, so that’s forgivable, surely.

Originally Posted by ghporter 

"Teaming with...." is the appropriate term, indicating a situation where something has lots of active content. An example would be "at 11:00 PM on Christmas Eve, the mall was teeming with shoppers."

"Brimming with..." implies something that is not merely full, evoking the sense that the contents are at the "brim" of the container, but going beyond the mere point that the item is full. There is no sense that the issue includes activity. "It was a soup brimming with warm goodness." is an example of this usage.

Moreover (to me, at least), ‘teeming’ doesn’t imply a container, while ‘brimming’ does. And ‘brimming’ doesn’t lend itself easily to be used of live beings—it needs a kind of uncountable ‘mass’ like a fluid, or a very large quantity of something taken as one indistinguishable whole.

“Brimming with people” sounds to me like there’s a gigantic bowl into which unconscious/dead people are being poured, and at some point, they’ve filled it up so much that they start falling over the edge. At that point, the bowl would be ‘brimming’ with people.

[ghporter]

My bad. I verified my paraphrased definition, then didn't proofread my spelling. Oops. "Teaming" is a verb, one of those unpleasant 80s verbs like "prioritize" and "partnering." And my fingers just seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to typing... Mea culpa.