Hey! I never complained about the name Webster. I just said that like Bing and Bob they were all Morocco-bound. So they were American. Bob wasn't really American, but he passed as one. The dictionary therefore one of American English, not proper English.

Is that so? Oh dear. Oh well, never mind.

I see you are a Trekkie, DA Wood. Does this mean you have antennae, or antennas?

I thought the sloppy use of "their" to refer to singular people was restricted to people, but tonight on television on a light-hearted chat show there appeared a pneumatic young starlet whose name I did not catch, who told us about the time she went swimming with a dolphin, which she referred to constantly as "they" and "them" and "their". Just the one dolphin, mind. I had supposed this apparent idleness of thought (failing to think singular/plural) is usually, when referring to people, perhaps owed to political correctness (must not offend female by referring to default masculine he/him/his, as the French do - 'ils' for they, etc) but if this extends to offending dolphins then, oh dear, ... But in fact it is just sloppy language, no? If it were a one-off example it would hardly matter at all, but it is endemic now.

Would it not have been natural to use "it" when telling folk about the time you swam with a dolphin, unless somehow you were aware of its actual gender, if it mattered.

Maybe that is why she is a customer service representative.

South African courts "plead / pleaded" or "ploeg / geploeg" in the 1970s, and now about a dozen proper African words saying the same to deal with as well.

Succinct, hey!

Wikipedia says of the AP Stylebook that "for nearly a quarter century it assumed its reader had a "solid grounding in language and a good reference library" and thus omitted any guidelines in those broader areas ..." but that in 1977 it felt it was necessary to start laying down diktats on this or that matter.
While I agree with DA Wood on what a bad business it is that ships and so forth are not to be referred to as 'she' and 'her', in the view of this book (best ignored on this one) it has certainly got it right on "pleaded": it would never do if we saw the colloquialism 'pled' to emerge in print with reference to the goings-on in courtrooms.
However I am all in favour of comic colloquialisms such as "dove" when referring to more light-hearted matters such as sport. Does this book allow it? What do they say in Tuscaloosa? I shall be thrilled soon to read in some newspaper "Tom Daley dove into the pool and surfaced waving another Olympic gold medal to add to his collection" and I won't care what the AP book says.
Rules were made for our guidance and should not be followed slavishly or mulishly. The great English judge Lord Denning knew that and was always in trouble for it but he is remembered as the greatest judge of the 20th century. (I doubt if he would have allowed 'pled' though if any barrister should have tried it on.)

Your speech-making headmaster was, I think, trying to curry favour with you by speaking down to you, using the dialectical 'the man sat on the mat' for 'the man sitting/seated at the back'. Well, it doesn't work, does it? You winced, you say.
Like the Scottish agricultural workers whose boss the laird talks posh English at home and among his peers, but adopts the argot of the open fields in addressing them in what he hopes is an approximation to the Scots language, also to curry favour, and they wince too. They grumble about it in the pub afterwards, and speak ill of the man. I know: I have heard them do so.

Like the pupils in a class where the teacher talks deliberately in demotic English in order to 'relate' to them. They in fact despise him for it, for they are not stupid and they realise that he must think they are, and that he is patronising them.

Politicians of a certain sort in England in public, on TV and in Parliament often deliberately talk down to people by their choice of language, even going so far as to adopt funny accents for the day, terrified that their audience might otherwise realise they (the politicians) are educated people and hate them for it. It is all inverted snobbery, as the British are peculiarly class-conscious, and very worried and confused about it, for they think class-consciousness is A Bad Thing.

Entertaining, though. The journalists make fun of them for it, for in Britain there is a healthy lack of undue respect for these folk.

The French word has acute accents on both letters e. It means summary. It is the correct way to do it, there is no other. Sadly I do not know how to type these on this keyboard so I cannot quote. The good lady who didn't care what the acute accent is for because she was getting a new kitten was confused by kitten = cute = acute accent = what was i saying?
Curriculum vitae means course of life. The plural should mean course of lives? or courses of lives: so curriculum vitarum, or curricula vitarum. This thing about curricula vita means courses of life - how many courses can a life have?

Webster's was mentioned in song by Bing and Bob, who at the time, like the dictionary, were Morocco-bound. They were diplomatically silent about their opinion of its content.