A bit more on pronunciation:

Edinburgh J - Many, perhaps most, people in Edinburgh pronounce the letter J to rhyme with the letter I, rather than the letter K. I wonder if this happens anywhere else.

aitch / haitch - I distinctly heard Charlotte Church (Welsh) say haitch on HIGNFY the other day. This is traditional in Cockney, but seems to be spreading. Its use in Cockney is not so surprising, as in traditional Cockneys, not only were Hs dropped, they were also sometimes added where they don't usually appear, as in - "This 'ere hedge of the table". Again. does this happen in other Englishes?

ate - I pronounce this to rhyme with bet, but a lot of British people now pronounce it to rhyme with late - it could be a generational thing

says - something similar seems to be happening here, with sez /sez/ increasingly changing to a pronunciation more like the spelling /seɪz/ (according to the BBC)

There's more about this at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588

@Hairy Scot - Menzies - I'm of the old school here, and pronounce it 'Ming-is’. I was very disappointed when the eponymous newsagents starting using the /z/ sound in their ads.

For those interested, there was a sound in Scots, akin to -ng or /ŋ/ which was seemingly rendered in manuscripts by a 27th letter called yogh. Later on, when printing came in, this letter wasn't available, so Scottish printers used the letter z instead, z not being used much in Scots.

(For non Scots) Here are a few Scottish examples where the z is silent:

Culzean Castle - pronounced Cul-ain
Dalrulzean, near Blairgowrie - Dal-rulion
Dalziel, traditionally pronounced Dee-el, although a lot of people with this as a family name pronounce the z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4595228.stm

As for the zed vs zee thing, zee seems to have started off as an English dialectical form in the 17th century, along with such other fanciful names as 'izzard', both of which were taken to America by early settlers (along with zed). It was apparently Webster who swung it for zee in his 1827 dictionary.

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000707
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z

@Hairy Scot - "It is a source of puzzlement to me that so many people take it upon themselves to pronounce certain rules as artificial or outmoded if those rules contradict their view."

Let's be clear about one thing first. On the vast majority of grammatical rules we are no doubt all in agreement, and I can assure you I'm not a "free-speller", nor do I think I'm a "relaxed grammarian". But there are a few so-called rules, some examples of which I gave above, which I believe to be optional or more applicable to formal language. It is not so much that these 'rules' contradict my view, as they contradict the reality of English as she is spoken by the majority of educated speakers. My previous post was certainly not meant to be a lecture, but to suggest that we have a different philosophical position in what constitutes grammar, that's all.

In my job, we have to make sure that we are teaching foreigners grammar that is accepted as correct by the vast majority of native speakers, and language that will sound natural and won't be seen as old-fashioned or over-formal. And where necessary we teach them the difference between formal and normal use, as with "whom". My view on this is absolutely in accordance with EFL and ESL teaching.

And I nearly always try to give references to back my position, but I see very few of these coming from the other side. Did you look at the Stephen Fry piece, by the way? Anyway, for some light Christmas reading, here are three more, from the website Motivated Grammar:

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/national-grammar-day-2011-ten-more-grammar-myths-debunked/
http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/national-grammar-day-2010-ten-more-common-grammar-myths-debunked/
http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-grammar-day-2009-ten-common-grammar-myths-debunked/

And all the best for the festive season to you and everyone else :)

@Skeeter Lewis - I totally agree with you as far as England (and no doubt Wales) is concerned, but not for Scotland, at least not in the legal sense (we have a separate legal system):

"The defendant pled guilty to stealing the egg of an Arctic tern, possessing 30 wild birds eggs and possessing equipment capable of being used to commit wildlife crime offences." (Scottish Government website - http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2005/02/17105152)

"Defendant pled no contest to transporting heroin" (caselaw.lp.findlaw.com)

"Michael Voudouri pled guilty to charges last month" (Glasgow Herald - http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/crime-courts/fraudster-goes-on-the-run.19557749)

'On sentencing Lord Glennie made the following statement in court: “You have pled guilty to a charge of attempted rape on the night of 11 September last year."' (http://www.scotland-judiciary.org.uk/8/823/HMA-v-THOMAS-McLAUGHLIN)

You can find many more examples by googling: "pled guilty" Scotland. Interestingly googling: "pleaded guilty" Scotland gets about the same amount of hits.

@Hairy Scot - to take your last point first. When have I ever said that people who follow the formal rules of grammar are wrong? That is nonsense. The boot is usually on the other foot. It is us (or we if you prefer) who use normal expressions like "I don't know who you mean", who are usually accused of being wrong. No descriptivist that I know of criticises formal use of language. Rather we defend the standard informal forms, and refuse to accept that they are somehow "incorrect".

I doubt very much that "those too lazy or ignorant to follow any kind of rules or structure in their use of the language" are likely to come out with a statement like "formalism of outdated artificial rules which have little basis in reality", to be honest. I am very well aware of the rules, but I am also very aware that many of these so-called rules are pretty arbitrary, and can often be traced back to one person's whim. Furthermore, many of these rules apply to formal language, which is not what we use in normal discourse.

It basically all boils down to how you understand 'rules'. My understanding of grammatical rules is that they are the structures that enable us to communicate efficiently. They have been formed over centuries of use and can and do change. I see no reason why the English of a particular group of people at a particular period of English (that of the prescriptivists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) should be carved onto tablets and taken as something immutable.

So by my definition of rules (which is more or less that of linguistics) the following are ungrammatical, because the majority of native speakers would find them so:

*The man died the dog bit.
*Mary beautiful is.
*Mike had bitten off more than he could chewed.

Whereas the following sentences are grammatically perfectly acceptable to most of us:

She's the woman who I told you about.
Hi, it's me. I'll be a bit late home tonight.
If anyone needs me, tell them I'll be back in half-an-hour.
This is the car which broke the land speed record.
Anybody that says that is an idiot.
Edinburgh is further from London than Newcastle.

Yet all of these are considered "wrong" by certain people.

As to "deterioration of the language", this is purely subjective, and I would suggest is the sort of "rear-view-mirrorism" we all indulge in from time. It has absolutely no foundation in linguistics. How can you call a language that is constantly evolving and increasing its vocabulary at such an astonishing rate "deteriorating"? And when exactly was this golden age when English was at the peak from which it is apparently declining?

Personally, I prefer to "enjoy" my language (as Stephen Fry puts it) for what it really is, rather than carping at other people's use of it and insisting on the use of outmoded or over formal grammatical forms in normal discourse. I highly recommend Fry's paean to the English language here. He says it a lot better than I can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

And you never answered my question: do you yourself often use "whom" in questions in your normal everyday speech? Do you practise what you preach? :)

@jiva - farther / further - even Fowler didn't accept that one. While we all use "further" to speak about more or additional - "We'll need to speak further about this" - the restriction to using only "farther" for distance is a purely artificial rule, invented by one man, Henry Bradley, an editor at the OED. This restriction had no basis in literature or usage, and it never took hold in the UK, for example, where most of us use "further" for everything, as indeed Fowler predicted we would.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA430

I think I'm in danger of competing with D.A.W. in the length stakes.

@Twain's Tapeworms.
1. We presumably capitalise CV because it's based on the title of a document. In any case this is the standard way it's shown in dictionaries, which is good enough for me.

2. Using full stops (periods) with intitialisms like this is mainly a style choice nowadays, isn't it? Again, the 5 (British) dictionaries I've checked all show CV without punctuation.

In fact if you google CV, with or without periods, you will see that virtually all the first page entries use capitals and no periods.

3. In Britain, it's using résumé (in any spelling you want) that would be considered affected - CV is the standard term for us.

4. If you're going to dump French, noble or otherwise, you're going to get rid of a hell of a lot of the language, n'est-ce pas?

PS - Personally I wouldn't use periods with that one either, but it's your choice: http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/punctuation-in-abbreviations
http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/english/2005/05/punctuation_in_.html

Sorry, silly misuse of copy and paste in that last one - I meant, of course - Most of us would say "Who does she mean?" or "I don't know who she means.", and would find "Whom does she mean?" and "I don't know whom she means." stilted and old-fashioned.

@Robbert Forbes MacGregor - yes, that's the rule that's often taught in the US, and is repeated on many writing sites. But you won't find that rule on many ESL or EFL websites, for the simple reason that hardly anyone speaks like that nowadays, and ESL and EFL websites teach real current English. Most of us would say "Who does she mean?" or "I don't know whom she means.", and would find "Whom does she mean?" and "I don't know whom she means." stilted and old-fashioned. Well, we would in Britain, at least; I can't speak for the US, but I think it's true there, too.

"Whom is not used very often in spoken English. Who is usually used as the object pronoun, especially in questions: Who did you invite to the party?" Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/whom

"Whom is only used in written English and in formal spoken English. Who is normally used as the object of a verb or preposition, but immediately after a preposition whom is generally used: the man with whom she lived. It would, however, be more natural to say: the man she lived with." Macmillan Dictionary

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/whom

"whom is dying out in England, where “Whom did you see?” sounds affected — Anthony Burgess (1980)" - from Merriam-Webster online dictionary (whom)

Your quote is a popular adaption of a poem by John Donne (1572 – 1631) - Meditation XVI, the last three lines of which are:

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

A great poem but perhaps not the best guide to modern English usage. Otherwise we'd be still using "thee" and "thou".

@Hairy Scot - personally, I prefer the real English of my peers to the formalism of outdated artificial rules which have little basis in reality. I like English as it is, as I hear it around me, not as a few people think it "should be". Do you actually know anyone who would say "Whom did you speak to?" or "Whom did you invite to the party?" in normal conversation? Do you actually say them yourself? I doubt it, somehow. But if you do, don't people give you funny looks? What is so wrong with the English of the vast majority of educated speakers that it makes you want to go "AARRGGGHH!!!!" ?

@porsche - speaking for myself, because I'm technologically incompetent. But thanks for the explanation.

@D.A.W I wasn't trying to take the glory away from the US, but rather giving a reason why we might have adopted the word 'valve' instead of vacuum-tube. I absolutely give way to you on the subject of engineering and the history of aviation. Although you somehow missed the British-invented hovercraft from your list.

I didn't suggest you had invented "contrarian", which is indeed in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, but that wasn't actually the word you used, which was "contrarism", and which I can't find in any dictionary. The bad news is, however, that you don't seem to be the first, as there are some 2000 odd references to it on Google and even one or two in Google Books (although mainly in Latin).

Ngrams corpus of American books suggests that Americans did in fact flirt with the word aeroplane for about twenty years before airplane took over in the early twenties.
And according to Etymology Online, the first references to the word "airplane" (1907) are in fact British, although the take-up was much quicker in the US, where "it largely superseded earlier 'aeroplane' (1873)". Incidentally Byron used the word "air-vessel" in 1822 (not so far from 'aircraft')

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=aeroplane%2Cairplane&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aeroplane

In language, things are never quite as simple as they might seem, and there are no doubt good reasons why some words get adopted in one part of the world, whereas others appeal more in other parts. We got aeroplane and no doubt aerodrome (cf hippodrome) from the French, who are our closest neighbours, and who were also very interested in aviation. At this time cross-Channel communication was no doubt rather easier than trans-Atlantic communication, so this is perhaps hardly surprising. But if you want to find the words we use wacky, that's fine by me. And for me these little historical differences are a subject of fascination rather than mockery.