It strikes me that Anwulf is attempting to do what a well-known English demonstrated was not possible, namely, hold back the tide. But then, Anwulf has always struck me as a bit of a Cnut.

Good to hear from Dale A Wood. Dale, are you the same Dale A Wood who has degrees from Auburn, Georgia Tech, and the University of Alabama, who used to be with the Department of Technology at Northern Illinois University, and who has published a number of papers on various subjects (such as "Adaptive competitive self-organizing associative memory")?

I don't understand why you can't use your mentality.

"General consensus" is not a redundancy, surely? It is specifying a consensus generally, as opposed to a consensus of a narrow class.

Still waiting to hear from Dale A Wood on whether he is the same Dale A Wood who has degrees from Auburn, Georgia Tech, and the University of Alabama, who used to be with the Department of Technology at Northern Illinois University, and who has published a number of papers on various subjects (such as "Adaptive competitive self-organizing associative memory"). I am beginning to think the DA Wood on this page is a fraud who claims those degrees when he doesn't have them.

Response to "Captain Mannering-ism": shouldn't that be "Mainwaring-ism?

I'm with you on this, Warsaw Will. If you replace the pronoun with the noun phrase it is obviously "is": "There are all sorts of things I believed in then which I don’t believe in now, and language rules set in stone is one of the sorts of things I believed in."

"Clarke lived about 15 years longer, and he was fascinated by the Internet, and he had Internet computers right in his own home on the island of Ceylon" It might have been Ceylon when Clarke moved there in 1956 but since 1972 it has been called Sri Lanka. Do keep up.

Still waiting to hear from Dale A Wood on whether he is the same Dale A Wood who has degrees from Auburn, Georgia Tech, and the University of Alabama, who used to be with the Department of Technology at Northern Illinois University, and who has published a number of papers on various subjects (such as "Adaptive competitive self-organizing associative memory"). I am beginning to think the DA Wood on this page is a fraud who claims those degrees when he doesn't have them.

Hurray for Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, I say. An excellent book. I do find disputes about US versus British English tiresome. As said above, good for the Americans. Many so-called Americanisms complained of by Brits aren't (gotten is a good example) and some spelling differences could have gone either way in British English (tire/tyre, for example: The Times used the former well into the 1920s) and words such as humor and other 'ou' words merely follow a pattern in British English anyway (we have dropped the 'u' in such words as governour and emperour).