Yes the_poetye, I agree it is good usage. To the person posting this question I would argue that this paragraph you present is perfect. The use of the term respective here arises because of the interruption in the sentence where each office is identified. If those regional offices were not identified, then the paragraph could have simply said something like there are three regional offices and each is responsible for the following duties. When you introduce that sort of parenthetical you want to say respective because the term sort of implies looking back and in this case we are in fact looking back at the parenthetical remark.

In fact if we leave the word respective out of the paragraph we run the risk of someone imagining some possible overlap with the specific duties that are listed at the end of the paragraph.

1. I think you should use the phrase how I am delighted to mean an ongoing situation. So if I say, you don't know how I am delighted to have you as a friend, you are really talking about an ongoing feeling of delight that you have. It's like everyday you wake up and think wow that friendship just delights the heck out of me. It would seem a little bit much to say this and might not be received as a genuine sentiment by the average English speaker.

2. I think this phrase, you don't know how delighted I am to have you as a friend, is a nice thing to say to someone that you don't hang around a lot but that you feel close to. It will seem genuine in that context because you're expressing that feeling of friendship that you have at that moment. This is in contrast to the first example above.

3. To say how you are lovable in my heart is a very odd way to phrase a feeling and I would agree with others who say it's not accurate. You mean to say how loved the person is in your heart. If they are simply lovable you are not saying that you love them. You are saying they have qualities that someone who knows them will love them.

4. I like this sentiment and would only suggest that you don't say heart and mind. We generally don't think about loving someone in our mind. One improvement I might suggest is to add the filler word soul. There really is no difference between the heart and the soul, but it sounds so sweet if you say, I love you in my heart and soul.

Good luck with it!

I posted this question about a year ago and since there are now 23 comments and my birthday is on the 23rd I thought I should chime in. Thanks to everybody for commenting. I just read through all of them. I have come to a couple conclusions and thought I'd share them.

First when we talk about this or next we are elevating from a structure of days in one week to days in a series of weeks. That is, if I'm only talking about days I can say on Wednesday. I think it's safe to say that on Wednesday means Wednesday of the week I am currently in. It doesn't matter if Wednesday has passed or not. However inside this structure of consecutive weeks we have to contend with the weekend. So if I say on the weekend that I'm going to the movies on Wednesday it obviously means of the coming week. I hope I would be speaking clearly if I said the same thing on a given Wednesday through possibly Monday. As someone pointed out if you get too close to that movie night it becomes ridiculous to speak in terms of weeks and you have to just say tomorrow or yesterday.

For disclosure I am a non-southern American. While I enjoy the grammatical efficiency of such southernisms as y'all and Wednesday week, I cannot bring myself to use them. I'd feel like a poser.

For the person who suggested we think of polls in a paddock I would like to suggest refining the analogy so that each poll of the seven in one paddock is somehow differentiated from all the others. Then restate the result. I don't think it would be the same as when all poles are identical. A further problem with the analogy of course since I was just talking about weekends is we don't have any special language introduced about the polls that are close to the border between the two paddocks.

I find myself rarely saying this Wednesday or next Wednesday. Since I posted this question I have tried to pay attention to my own usage. I tend to say Wednesday of next week. If I say this Wednesday I might be more inclined to add a little and say Wednesday of this week.

I think I have an idea of how people in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand would deal with this issue. How do people in India deal with this?

In sentence 1, "that" refers to "rates of electricity generation," not simply "electricity generation." I agree with the commenter that said "those" would work; it is a plural we are talking about ("rates"). But I think "that" is fairly conventional, as used here.

For sentence 2, I am afraid we as a nation are susceptible to the same problem people experience everywhere--we think we are the center of everything and beyond us there is nothing. This is why we say "in KS," meaning that Kansas is a part of this great and total universe called the U.S., while we say "of" with respect to the U.S. total. There is no sense in our minds of the U.S. being part of anything else (such as the rest of the world). We are used to comparing parts of the U.S. to the whole. It comes with having a huge country and being a superpower. Once we compare KS to the whole country, we are done.

If you are talking about a rectangle, which is usually represented in a sort of landscape orientation, and describing the dimensions as width and length, it is only natural to use "length" to reference the longer side. It would be odd to have the shorter side described as length. This seems to me to be simply a convention in geometry. It doesn't have to make sense with English, Merriam-Webster or any other source. It just needs to be internally consistent within Geometry and to make sense with the terms that are chosen for the shapes. True, you can make a case that "width" doesn't appear to be used well here, but if it is paired with "length," I don't see a way around this outcome. Be comforted by the fact that this is walled off from the rest of the language and should cause no one any serious difficulty.

You might make a similar a similar complaint in graphing with the term "rise over run." Run is a bit ambiguous, as is width. But there is no mistaking what rise is on a graph.

Perhaps the confusion here CAN bleed into the "real" world. There are times I have been confused about a product description, for example, when two dimensions are simply described as a number by another number, such as 100 mm x 100 mm. Obviously a square, but if the numbers aren't equal, you might have to surmise what side the longer number refers to. I am sure there have been other instances. What I find is that the confusion is only me. The people in that business use these numbers all the time and there is no question about them. It helps me to get someone on the phone and discuss the product so I can become familiar with their jargon.

Emailing, texting, tweeting--these are already affecting our writing. Remember when you wrote an email like a letter? Now, there is a subtle coercion when someone emails me and hits the carriage return. They are being formal. If they just say hi john and use a hyphen or comma and then start in with whatever they are saying, they are mimicking spoken language, perhaps what you'd expect to hear in a voicemail.

I think we will continue to have formal writing as long as there are business and government transactions. It's authoritarian, I know, but still seems appropriate to me. We are still in the early days of the internet. Wait 20 years, maybe 50. We might see a lot, ahem, much less formal usage.

In the US saying waiting on sort of pegs you as a southerner, almost as strongly as y'all. Ahm waitin on ya means hurry the heck up.

"How about never? Does never work for you?" Quote, possibly inexact, from a cartoon in, I think, The New Yorker.

I agree about the structure you laid out Howard, on a mathematical calendrical level. However, we have to allow for fuzzy logic. I think many people have an understood "of next week" in the phrase "next Wednesday," especially if it's Monday or Tuesday.

Thanks for not being a pain in the Yiddish.

I agree with others here. If you want to be clear that there was a prison break, say from prison. It brings to the mind of the reader that there was a building or structure involved. Without the preposition "from," it's ambiguous and could mean someone avoided prison.

When you debate with someone, you are most likely in public and people are wondering what all the fuss is about.

When you debate someone, you are on a stage in a formal setting.