D A Wood Flogging? Would you include Enron or Sub-Prime perpetrators, Jimmy Swaggart or perhaps even drunken ex-presidents who do not know how to spell nuclear? Your punctuation and presentation leave a bit to be desired, too. If you wish to use words or phrases to be offensive, at least spell them correctly - begone is just that, not be gone. Oh I forgot, you might be American, in which case feel free to bastardise English. Webster and you - what a language-busting team you would be. Best wishes, Les (UK - with no commas).

Something that seems to be lost on many posters is the fact that the "pled/pleaded" usage revolves around its specific legal ramifications: it's a peculiarity - if you will - but pleaded, contrary to many posters' ideas, is the older of the two spellings, and as one poster said "pled = upstart". Without wishing to open a debate (well, provocatively perhaps I do!) on the virtues or not of the American take on "English", I think I should say how much "gotten" grates, to me, along with many other Americanisms: fibre/fiber, metre/meter (meteric?), centre/center (centeral) and colour/color are just a few (oh, and aluminum and labratory - along with Bush's "nukular" always leave me very puzzled). Ah well, c'est la vie, I suppose.