Has anyone read this foreword on the OED site, as to the grounds for which Old English words are inbodied and which left out?

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/old-english-in-the-oed/

And you say that "We all know that hardly anyone uses correct English in informal situations". I disagree, and so would any linguist. Hardly anyone uses formal grammar in informal situations, that's true, but that doesn't mean we're not using correct grammar, just grammar of a different register. (And in fact there aren't that many differences between formal and informal grammar anyway - and most of those are to do with the use of pronouns).

For me, formal really does mean formal. And that doesn't necessarily include the classroom or the broadcasting studio. In an English class children should learn Standard English, but I see no reason why teachers shouldn't use the dialect they share with the children to talk about science, or even Standard English - some studies have shown that children do better at Standard English when a comparative approach is used. Perhaps you've seen the film 'Kes'; was the teacher a worse teacher because he used dialect with the boy? I think not. Because he was making real contact with him; something the other teachers hadn't managed to do.

I heartily welcome the expansion of regional accents on British radio and TV and see no reason why a bit more dialect shouldn't slip in as well. After all, that's how most people speak in Britain and we are quite used to hearing dialect in drama and comedy programmes. Standard English is not better than regional dialects, just more appropriate in certain social situations. But times change. Businessmen who use Standard English with their clients may well chat in dialect with their colleagues. With some clients they will use a more formal register than with others. And language (in Britain at least) has been getting less formal for the last fifty years or so.

As for Geldorf's outburst, I wasn't talking about grammar but about register. The F-word is not normally considered acceptable pre-watershed fare.

And I'm still baffled by your comment - "Is 'Pain in the English' the right forum for arguing that it doesn't matter whether it is correct? " - for a start, I don't think anyone was arguing that, but I was certainly arguing that there are times when idiom takes precedence over formal grammar. And your definition of what is correct and not correct is very different from mine (for example 'singular they'), and from the norms of TEFL, for example. So I think it is exactly the right forum for discussing what we mean by correct, and and how much importance we should give to formal grammar.

Our philosophies on language are very different, and no doubt we will continue to cross swords. But I'll try to temper my language in future.

A few qwotes:

The Norman monks looked upon English books ("Anglo- Saxon MSS.") as "old and useless," and cleaned the writing off the parchment with pumice stone, and then used it for their own documents. … A Biographical History of English Literature, p18

Nay; so far did the Normans carry their oppression, that little boys at school were obliged to translate their Latin into French, and the mother tongue was banished from the schoolroom. p26

And it is a fact worthy of special — notice that between 1350 and 1485 the English language had changed so much that the old version of John de Trevisa was almost unintelligible. … In fact, the vocabulary of the English language was changing; it was becoming extremely Latinised, and the genuine English words of Trevisa were falling into forgetfulness. Mr.Marsh mentions that Caxton's "Game of the Chesse", contains three times as many French words as the "Morte d'Arthur" of Sir Thomas Malory.

That the sixteenth century was the time of pedantio quotation, many books being crammed with Latin quotations, often more numerous than the original matter. p93

But from the beginning of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries, "it is probable," says Mr. Wright, "that the great mass of the reading public were as well acquainted with Latin as with their own mother tongue." And, within the same period, *** it came to be the fashion to use Latin words in an English shape*** to an enormous extent. It was extremely easy to do this. A writer had only to take the root of a Latin word, and give an English ending and a slightly English look, and the thing was done. p117

Sir Thomas Browne ..., " We shall, within a few years, be fain ***to learn Latin to understand English***, and a work will prove of equal facility in either." p118

This use, then, of Latin words had got, not only into written, but into spoken, language; it had made its way into the Court, into the bar, and into the pulpit. It was ***practised and was understood by every one who had the slightest claim to education***. Spenser lived in the midst of all this; and, as himself a learned man and a courtier, he could not have resisted its influence. And thus Spenser could not help using Latin expressions ***where English would have done equally well***. p119

... a " Person of Quality " in the last century finds it necessary, on the contrary, to rid him of his " Saxon dialect ;" p120

And so that you'll know that the writer wasn't a Saxonist:

It will also be plain to the reader that all the poetry and prose, but more especially the poetry, of Englishmen down to the fourteenth century (with the single and brilliant exception of Laurence Minot, and he was of French origin) is dull, heavy, and only half articulate Their works read like the feeble and clumsy efforts of half-educated country people to express their thoughts. The Norman-French leaven was needed to raise them out of their infantile condition, and to produce the free and powerful speech of a Chaucer. p37

And Johnson (or wordbook gefrain) said in a foreword to his wordbook, somewhat ironically given that he was writing in a latinate hevy way:

… let them, … endeavour, with all their influence, to stop the licence of translators, whose idleness and ignorance, ***if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France***.

I have repeatedly written of how I enjoy the peculiarities of Scottish English, Scots, South African, West Country, Australian and even American English. Life is not hard at all, I assure you. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I am arguing that there is a standard form suitable for formal occasions, and it should be known what it is so that it may be used when it is appropriate to do so, and that the people to show the way include teachers.

What's ungrammatical about "Fuck the speech"? Seems fine to me. A simple imperative. In my working days as a teacher I often thought in such terms when attending interminable meetings listening to old bores droning on.

1. intransitive - to rest your weight on your bottom with your back vertical, for example on/in a chair - "He went and sat beside her."

2. transitive - sit somebody + adverb/preposition to put somebody in a sitting position - "She sat him down in front of the fire with a hot drink."

The standard use is intransitive - you don't sit yourself, you just sit.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/03/

Not in answer to your question, but as a matter of interest, in Britain we usually do it the second way Max_Eliott mentioned - single quotation marks on the outside, double quotation marks for nested quotations. But I've never seen triple quotes. We also use different punctuation, so called "logical punctuation", but that's a different story, although its use seems to be increasing in the US:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the_rise_of_logical_punctuation.html

@Max-Eliot - it's just an idiom. And yes, of course it's about comparison of two things - but one where there's not really much difference.

God was pleased by what he asked for and he gave him WISDOM that no other was equal or better then, even to this day. Lucas knew this and made the association, and used the name Jedi, because their strength was suppose to be their wisdom.

"Sally remarked, 'Ginny, if you say "hell" again, I'll wash your mouth with soap.' "

Here, the word "hell" is in double quotes.

Other countries (like Germany, I believe) have a different approach, which is to move from single to double to triple quotes, like so:

'Sally remarked, "Ginny, if you say '''hell''' again, I'll wash your mouth with soap." '

For example:

"Which was harder, Johnny? The transition from high school to college or college to grad school?"

"Oh, same difference."

You also suggest that "I was sat" means by someone or myself. But in English we don't usually use passive constructions for actions we do to ourselves, where other languages might use a reflexive. We don't say "This morning I was cut while I was shaved" unless we've been to visit a barber. We might say informally "Sit yourself down", but we wouldn't say "please, be sat". There is, I grant you, of "Please be seated", but I imagine that is an exception, and originally meant that someone would "seat" you, as in a restaurant.

And as for "potential donors to worthy causes, who will be put off" - Hardly; potential donors don't seem to be quite as po-faced as you give them credit for. At the first Live-Aid concert, broadcast live on prime-time TV, the BBC announcer was about to read out the address where donations could be sent, when Bob Geldorf interrupted with "Fuck the address, let's get the numbers!" - After his outburst, giving increased to £300 per second. (Wikipedia).

You ask "Is 'Pain in the English' the right forum for arguing that it doesn't matter whether it is correct? We all know that hardly anyone uses correct English in informal situations, but we should look to to ensure that people have a chance to know what is correct so that when it matters, especially in formal situations, we may use it." - I have no problem with teaching people to use more formal language when it is appropriate, but I hotly contest that only formal usage is "correct". As the author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language has said, "informal is normal". To say that the everyday informal language spoken by the majority of educated speakers is incorrect is to totally misunderstand what grammar is: the syntax we use to be able to be mutually understood. What you mean by "correct" is not how linguists understand "correct". "I my dog for a walk took" is incorrect; no native speaker would say it. "Me and John are going to the pub", on the other hand, is just a matter of register, or formality. And now you seem to be questioning whether 'Pain in the English' should be the forum for discussing things that don't come into your narrow idea of "correctness". Are you suggesting that those of us who don't share your prescriptive views of the English language should just shut up?

In any case it's "Pain in the English", not "Pain in the Grammar". English is about a lot more than grammar. It is also about idiomatic, natural, everyday language, something you seem to despise. It must be hard going through life with all this ugliness around you.

The Longman Dictionary example you provided does highlight it's best application to me, but it still sounds off.I guess the most I can do is be dissatisfied with its saturation, but I appreciate you clearing it up for me.

But secondly, it's far from meaningless; it's like saying - "Well, these two things (whatever they are) may look different, but as far as I'm concerned they're more or less the same." - "same difference" makes perfect sense in this context. And it's efficient - just two words.

Example form Longman Dictionary - 'I could mail the letter or send a fax in the morning.' - 'Same difference. It still won't get there on time.'

It's a bit like saying "six one, half a dozen the other" - another colloquial expression which needs no justification, or do you think that's "a junk phras" too?

"Is there any validity in this phrase, outside modern colloquialism?" - isn't modern colloquialism validity enough? And it can hardly be meaningless when everyone understands what it means.

@Will, dont worry. You haven't thrown a spanner anywhere. As I pretty much already intimated, I quite agree that users of "was sat" probably mean "was sitting", etc., but I think the grammatical argument is hardly theoretical. What people actually mean is irrelevant to my point. That's a matter of semantics, not grammar. Perhaps I'm beating a dead horse, as I've already made my point, but compare:

I pushed John
I was pushing John
I was pushed by John

I ran the company
I was running the company
The company was run by me

I sat
I was sitting
I was sat (by someone or myself)

As in all the other examples, "was sitting" is the past progressive (continuous, state of being); "was sat" is the past perfect (discrete action, action verb).

As for common usage being idiomatic, of course that's the case. But, consider the following; everyone who was sitting must have been sat and everyone who has been sat (or seated, if you prefer) must have been sitting afterwards. It is impossible to be one without having first been the other. Thus, at least to me, it is perfectly understandable how the two could become so semantically intertwined that the meaning would become blurred, leading to the present idiomatic use. By the way, I made a similar argument about "have got" in another post here and was vehemently (and incorrectly), dismissed (when I have sufficient time, I will probably write a lengthy rebuttal there).

Actually, if you think about it, isn't "was seated" meaning "to be in a sitting position", just as idiomatic, if not more so? The verb "to seat" never means to be sitting. It only means to place into a seated position. At least the verb "to sit" can mean both. It's really less logical to accept "was seated" over "was sat" (and before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, I'm not claiming that it's wrong. All of these idioms are commonly understood and their meanings are well defined).

Funny how a bunch of pedants (myself included) can bicker so doggedly over that which we mostly agree on:)

There is nothing ungrammatical about singular they, just as we use "you are" with singular meaning, and it is the natural follow-on to impersonal pronouns such as "anybody, everybody" etc - "If anybody calls when I'm out, ask them to leave a message". This is absolutely standard in British English when the sex of the person is unknown, and is used for example in passport application forms. It is also pretty common in American English too; even AP have now dropped their objection to it.

What's more, singular they has a long and illustrious history in English, going back at least to Chaucer (and long before political correctness, before you bring that one up) :

"And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, they wol come up ..."

and including:

Jane Austen - "I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly"
Thackery - "A person can't help their birth"
Orwell - "We can only know an actual person by observing their behaviour"

And it's even sometimes used when the person's sex is known:

"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me as if I were their well-acquainted friend" (Shakespeare)
"No man goes to battle to be killed. But they do get killed" (George Bernard Shaw)

I'm sorry that natural idiomatic English should sound so terrible to you.

One thing, I bet that those who say "conversate" don't make fatuous and snobbish remarks like these about other people's language the way you do. I'm afraid you say more about yourself than about them.

Furthermore, you already have two contrasting ideas in the first section - "Despite many years of ..." and "the US didn't intervene". So your first idea is not so much about the US's non-intervention, but about the contrast. Your next part, about their reasoning, may be related to the non-intervention,but not really to this contrast. Personally, I feel that "officially ended" cries out for a natural break, and a full stop (period) would be much more appropriate here.

Now for the colon; its position is fine, but I'm concerned about what comes after it. I feel if you use "include" here we expect a list of things, i.e. noun phrases, but you have standard sentences. Secondly "reasoning" is uncountable, so no "s" at the end. I would suggest something like: "Their reasoning behind not interfering was based on several factors: the US was in a time of ... etc".

(By the way, who cares about a missed call, if the caller's number remains unknown? Why would we want to know that a mysterious stranger called at all?)

Some have said that expressions such as "you lot sat there in the corner" (describing where you lot are, not to what you did) sound plain wrong and the users of such ugly expressions are diminished in the opinion of the audience who may be job interviewers, or potential donors to worthy causes, who will be put off. So there may be serious consequences to using such terms.

Some say they are ungrammatical, because the wrong parts of the verb are being used, so causing confusion as to what is meant.

Others say it doesn't matter as long as the drift of what is being said is clear enough so let it all hang out and don't bother to get it right because folk'll probably know what you mean, hey?

Is 'Pain in the English' the right forum for arguing that it doesn't matter whether it is correct? We all know that hardly anyone uses correct English in informal situations, but we should look to to ensure that people have a chance to know what is correct so that when it matters, especially in formal situations, we may use it.

Although I think a theoretical grammatical explanation can be put forward for it, which I tried to do in an earlier comment, what it really boils down to is this is an idiomatic expression which is becoming increasingly popular among speakers of Standard British English. Many authorities, Fowler for one, believe(d) that established idiomatic use supersedes theoretical grammar. I grant you that "was sat" is still borderline, but it is very evident listening to BBC Radio 4 (the most "Standard" of British radio stations) that its use is becoming increasingly common among non-dialect speakers.My bet is that in twenty years or so, few people will remember what all the fuss was about.

I say 'sit' has a past participle active "sitting" and passive "seated". Active when he chose to sit, passive when it was forced upon him, so to speak, and he was made to sit.

"Sat" is the past, or perfect, tense of sit. As in the cat sat on the mat. If you say the cat was sat on the mat it means it was told to do it (but it wouldn't, of course, because it was a cat). If you say the cat was sitting on the mat it means it was already there, in that position, having sat down there earlier.

Warsaw Will quoted with approval Sue Perkins "When nobody's looking, I like to watch Graham [Norton] sat at a stool, braddle out ...", then eight months later Tessa asserted, without giving any grammatical argument or reason whatever, "both of these are completely correct ... " which I took to be a reference to the argument so far. She then suggested "was sat" and "sat" and "was sat sitting" as being just fine. The colon at the end of her first paragraph shows that she was in fact referring to what was to come, and to what had gone before. It's a very small colon, but it is there and I missed it. mea culpa.

Despite many years of complete massacre and annihilation of Jews and other religions, the United States didn’t intervene in the Holocaust until 1944- 11 years into the mass-killing, and 1 year before it officially ended (“United States Policy Toward”); a few of their reasoning’s behind not interfering sooner include: the US was in a time of economic depression, xenophobia & anti-Semitic feelings, and the US army’s aircraft didn’t have the capacity to bomb Auschwitz accurately (“United States Policy Toward”).

The word "sit" has a number of definitions with subtle differences. It can mean "to be in a sitting position", or "to assume a sitting position", but it can also mean "to place someone (or oneself) into a sitting position". If one were to use "was sat" as the passive voice, meaning "to be placed into a sitting position", then exactly how would that be ungrammatical? Something like "I was sat in the third row by that usher over there".

Yes, yes, you could say "I was seated by that usher...", but that's a different verb entirely. Synonymous, yes, but so what? "To sit" means "to place in a seated position", just like "to seat" does. So again, just because there's another more common way to say something doesn't make another version wrong no matter how unusual or awkward it may sound. So, if someone said "I was sat in the front row. It was great!" and they meant that they were sitting in the front row, then yes, their statement might be considered wrong or at least idiomatic, but still not ungrammatical. You see, they might have meant that that they were placed in their seats, perhaps by an usher, or even under their own locomotion. This construction would be correct, which validates the grammar regardless of its potential misuse.

By the way, if you really think about it, "was sat" has definite advantages over "was seated". "Was seated" is ambiguous. It can mean "was sitting" or "was placed in one's seat". But, "was sat" can only mean "was placed in one's seat". So, if you want to clearly and unambiguously indicate that you were brought to your seat and placed in it, then "was sat" should really be preferred, yes?

It isn't.

And Will, while your explanation certainly makes sense, I can't help but think of "baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?..." :)

The "...sat at a stool..."comment was from Warsaw Will's post of September 4, 2012, 12:03pm, not Tessa's post. Tessa's post does follow, but has nothing to do with Will's previous post. Hers is just a continuing discussion of the relevant topic.

Look closely again at Tessa's post. Here's a shortened version:

"Both of these are ... correct...:"
"He was sat at the table".
"He was sitting at the table".

See the colon? The "Both" in Tessa's post is clearly referring to the two examples in Tessa's own post. She was comparing "...was sat at the table" to "...was sitting at the table" and nothing more. If she were replying specifically to Will's comment, why would she use the word "both"? Will didn't offer two examples to be compared. Why would she follow up with a colon and then list two examples that only make sense in the context of her previous sentence? Her post stands on its own. In fact, it only makes sense when viewed this way.

Do note, I'm not addressing whether or not "was sat" is OK; I'm merely clarifying Tessa's comments.

If you object to the dorky sounding nature of Preconscious (and fair enough), and wanted to simplify it for the general public, I'd have this:
Conscious - as discussed
Basic everyday working memory
Unconscious - as discussed, however, note this the dreaming part in all of this

To substitute for Preconscious with simply "your basic memory" (or something similar) would have no conflict with psych, and be just as useful. Let the Freudians say Preconscious if they really have to, and in the meantime, it'd still be conscious and unconscious, which would make the psychologists very happy.

Why I do NOT run with Freud on this one and why I have Hollywood behind me (haha) is simply that we (not psychologists who want to make things seem very difficult) know there are simply 3-layers of the mind to be dealt with.

I. CONSCIOUS: Me writing this right now and you reading this right now.

II. SUBCONSCIOUS/PRECONSCIOUS: You already knowing you're going to thumb up this article without even having thought about it.

III. UNCONSCIOUS: When you were five, someone dropped a large psychology book on your head which caused the need for 17-stitches on the top of your head and so your mind repressed that memory to never be brought back up again.

Now, what's the problem? We have a "workbench" that the mind uses that is IN BETWEEN those two layers. This level of consciousness is tapped into from Layer I and also accessed from Layer III. Now, in the English language, what is the proper term to describe "UNDER" a layer? What is a good term to describe "BETWEEN" two layers? Well, for me, in English, the term "SUB" is way more descriptive than the term "PRE" which conjures more of a "BEFORE" than a "BELOW" or "INBETWEEN". So, I will not be utilizing what that mother-loving psycho Freud said (said laughingly with love) but will instead be using the much more sensical "SUBCONSCIOUS" to mean the workbench the mind uses to access UNCONSCIOUS thoughts when they surface as well as remembering temporary data like phone numbers etc.

And while there's an 1859 book "Memorials of the Montgomeries, earls of Eglinton" the Wikipedia entry on Clan Montgomery shows the coat of arms of the Montgomerys, Earls of Eglinton.

There is a further complication in that, according to the Clan Montgomery website, some people have the surname Montgomerie, which would boost the IE figures. Incidentally, that website seems to use exclusively "Montgomerys" when talking of various Montgomery families.

http://www.clanmontgomery.org/links.html

This Ngram graph suggests that the Y version overtook the IE version around 1910, and that the Y version is much more common nowadays.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+Montgomeries%2Cthe+Montgomerys&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Small point. If you're writing a historical novel, shouldn't you have been doing this sort of research already?

If it's the afternoon or later however, past simple would be more appropriate - "Ali didn't have breakfast this morning".

If by any chance you're translating from Spanish, the rules for using pretérito perfecto with present time periods, and pretérito indefinido with and past time periods, are exactly the same as in English.

Where it gets a bit more complicated is with expressions like today, which can be divided up into parts:

Salesman to his colleague at 4pm - I've opened four new accounts today.
Same man to his wife at 8pm - I opened four new accounts today.

You might think that "today" was the current time period in both cases, so both should have present perfect. But in the second case he is really thinking of his working day, which is now finished, and so a past time period.

What John actually said was "Who makes the rules of English grammar, if not the users of English?". He neither said "makes up" nor "an English speaker". And nor did anyone else, as far as I can see. What they talked about was "common usage", something very different from your interpretation.

And of course he is (they are) perfectly correct; the rules of any language come from what generations of speakers of that language (or specific dialect, for example Standard English) have decided is acceptable: that's where grammar comes from. It's only later that it gets codified in grammar books. The earliest English grammar books recognised this, as do most modern grammars. Unfortunately, in between we had the prescriptivists, who tried to carve certain rules into stone, and even more unfortunately, some people still take the same attitude.

Before advising people to "get a grip" and accusing others of making "idiotic submissions", perhaps you should try engaging your own brain, or at least learn how to read.

I would suggest that is exactly what is happening in Britain with "he was sat". It is now often used by people who speak otherwise totally standard British English, and for many (probably most) of us poses absolutely no problem, however much some people cry "incorrect". We've heard it all before: for "ten items or less", for "that" instead of "which"etc. If we are sensible we simply ignore it; the more inquisitive of us try to find an explanation, as I tried to do in my last comment.

Grammar doesn't come from books or immutable laws; it has been formed by generations of native speakers arriving at a consensus as to what is acceptable. I don't hear much outcry in Britain at the increasing use of this (to me rather attractive) idiom. And so what if it is dialect? (After all Standard English is also only a dialect, linguistically speaking). Some of us would welcome a little more dialect in realms where Standard English has traditionally held sway: on the BBC, for example.

And "sat" and "sat sitting" in place of "sitting" and "seated" just aren't correct. When these terms are used they do not pretend to be standard English.

2) "Calls are answered in the order received" is correct English, but to appear personal, companies want to tell you about "your" call, not just calls in general.

3) "We answer calls in the order received" is also correct English. This option not only has the same problem as (2) above, but is even worse because the company becomes the subject of the sentence by the use of active voice. So this makes the sentence primarily about the company, rather than your call.

4) "Your call will be answered in turn" is, I think, this is the best solution.