Red, I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but I think AClose's point is that merchandise as a verb may not have arisen by adding a verb ending -ise (or -ize) to the noun, merchant (and, er, changing the "t" to a "d"?). Instead, it may have come about by verbifying the noun, merchandise.

John, the "different to" I was referring to is something like this: "does this seem different to you?" As for "different to" used similarly to "different from", personally, I've never heard it, but then I'm not from the UK (but do have UK relatives, etc.).

I'm not sure I agree about "different to" as mentioned above a few times. To me, "A is different from B" means that A and B are dissimilar. "A is different to B" means that B is of the opinion that A is different from some unstated or previously stated norm.

This has been discussed in some detail already. See:

http://painintheenglish.com/?p=1521

and

http://painintheenglish.com/?p=1600

Also, mentioned in passing in quite a few posts on this site.

Obviously, "...nad..." = "...and..."

Mr. Daley, I'm pretty sure that Frank Merton meant to say "confer", not "infer". I'm baffled, however, as to why you feel the need to discuss implying and imputing. While I do agree that "gift" as a verb has become a bit of a buzzword lately, I really fail to understand any objection to it by you and others. First, it's use isn't a recent phenomenon (even if it's overuse might be). Using gift as a verb goes back to the sixteenth century. Next, this noun-verb duality is very common in English with probaby thousands (tens of thousands?) of examples. Do you object to "walk" as a verb because one can also say "take a walk"? Next, "gift" as a verb isn't redundant at all. In fact, it is quite useful as a more concise way to express the idea. "Giving" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "gifting". If it merely leaves my hands and passes to yours, I have given it to you. I may or may not have gifted it to you. to you. Even if I say "give a gift", technically, there's still some ambiguity. I may have physically given you a gift from someone else, or intended for someone else. "Gifted" is precise nad unambiguous. It also is unique in its definition. So, why the objection? Yes, it is a kind of "flavor of the month", but so what? That doesn't make it wrong or even undesirable. If anything, everyone should be objecting to "give a gift" as unnecessarily verbose when "gift" would do just fine.

To "Anonymous coward": you said that the second one is correct, but the link you posted says both are correct!!

Stan Jones, do you have any reference materials to back that up? As far as I know, the possessive pronoun, "its" does not take an apostrophe in the UK either. Such an apostrophe is not taught in British schools or approved of in any UK grammar books or style guides, nor is it commonly embraced by the British populace, at least, not any more or less than anyone in the United States. Without starting yet another prescriptive vs. descriptive arument, most just consider it a careless mistake.

HairyScot, I'm not sure which one you found to be a verb. I couldn't find one. Also, in all fairness, a few of the examples in the link were definitely correct, only a few were definitely incorrect, but most were ambiguous at best. For those, it would be impossible to say they're wrong without getting inside the head of the writer.

Actually, whether certain punctuation goes inside or outside quotation marks is a subject of much debate. This is also one of those things that's different between American and UK English (American inside, and UK outside). Funny though, I was taught to punctuate outside the quotation marks and I'm American.