@cheyenne - that doesn't sound too surprising as, according to Wiktionary, "make" is about 50 times more common in the US; (but only) 7 times in the UK, so it sounds as though it's definitely a British thing, but one which some people think is inveigling its way into American usage, and not to their liking, apparently.

A certain Emily Wolfe wrote to the New York Times that ''Commentators, politicians and, most recently, a Harvard economist on ABC News are now referring to decisions being >taken rather than >made. Have you noticed people are taking more decisions? It sounds extremely affected to me.'' The NYT follow this up with some examples from the American press, but note that most of the sources were in fact foreign

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Collocations_of_do,_have,_make,_and_take
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/16/magazine/on-language-take-that-decision.html

@porsche - First of all, all the best in your difficult situation, and I hope everything gets back to normal for you as quickly as possible.

"Sequence of Tenses" is not a term I've come across in TEFL materials, so I've been investigating it a bit. There seem to be two approaches - "natural sequence" and "attracted sequence" and the merits of each have been hotly debated for over 200 years.

As I understand it, natural sequence would allow for or even prefer your example "That was Steve. He said that we now have power.", but attracted sequence would insist on the use of past tenses. I think this is mainly a problem in formal writing rather than in everyday conversation, and the followers of the attracted version seem to have to go through hula-hoops to avoid exactly the sort of situation you've just described.

There's a piece on it at MWDEU, which gives the preferred "natural" example - "The Lone Ranger said that crime doesn't pay" as opposed to the attracted version - "The Lone Ranger said that crime didn't pay". Wikipedia call "Batman said that he needs a special key for the Batmobile." a proper sentence by the rules of natural sequence, I think suggesting that the followers of natural sequence would consider it better than if a past tense had been used.

EFL/ESL seems to sit on the fence a bit, allowing both, as can be seen in the examples I quoted earlier on.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA838
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_tenses

You bring up another interesting point which may possibly be a difference between AmE and BrE: if Steve had actually said "We had power" - we would teach students to backshift that to "Steve said that we had had power", which might lessen the confusion a bit. But I don't know if Past perfect is used as much in the States as over here.

@Skeeter Lewis - sorry, that sounded a bit more hectoring than I meant it to be. In any case I seem to remember agreeing with you quite a bit when you started. :) :)

@Skeeter Lewis - Check before you click, and we might occasionally agree on things. It is absolutely relevant that the situation still exists, as virtually any source on reported speech would have told you. Note - In TEFL and ESL we usually refer to sequence of tenses as backshifting.

"Optional Backshifting - When the verb of speech introducing the indirect speech is in a past tense (simple, progressive or perfect), and the situation reported is still true at the moment of speaking, we can, but do not have to, backshift" - http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/indirect-reported-speech.html

"Backshift of Simple Present is optional if the situation is still unchanged or if you agree with the original speaker." - http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/reported-speech/advanced

"If somebody talked about a situation that has still not changed ... a reporter can often choose whether to to keep the original speaker's tenses or change them. Both structures are common" - Practical English Usage - Michael Swan (Oxford)

"As we saw earlier, when we have a reporting verb in a past tense, the tense of the idea being reported is usually backshifted (goes back one). But if the idea is still true, we can use a present tense instead." - Warsaw Will - http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com.ar/2012/03/reported-speech-lesson-and-exercises.html

@Kamran - I should have added that if you don't believe what the other person has said, keep it in the past - "She said she was ill, but I don't believe her."

I just came across this sentence - "[they're] just a couple of blokes, not that different from you or I, ..." - in a comment in the Guardian, which, although I wouldn't say it myself, doesn't sound that bad to me. So I did a little experiment - first I tried Ngram, where "different form you or I" registers absolutely zilch. So then I tried Google Books, where "different from you or I" gets a mere 357 as opposed to 2770 for "different from you and me", and the full phrase "not that different from you or I" gets just 2 compared with 64 for the "me" version.

But on the Internet it's a different story - a Google search for "not that different from you or I" gets 15,900 hits, but the "me" version is not even double that - 25,900, and when I tried "different from you or I", the difference is staggering - 1,920,000 for the "I" version in comparison with only 314,000 for the "me" version. Now admittedly the first entry for the former was - “I am different from you,” or “I am a different kind of person than you.” - but all the entries in the next ten pages were for the full phrase "different from you or I".

So it looks as though there's quite a difference between what is seen as acceptable for published works, and what people are actually saying. But can anyone tell me why this doesn't seem to sound as bad (to me) as "he gave it to Michelle and me". Has it become almost idiomatic?

If the statement still holds true you have a choice: you can still follow the sequence of tenses, or you can you can use a present tense. In the raining example we might well use a present tense to stress the fact that it is still raining.

But remember you also need to change pronouns -"Saba told her that the committee commented that they (or the school) had a beautiful library / have a beautiful library."

By the way, very few people would answer the phone - "This is she", perhaps "Hello, this is Betty" or "Hello, Betty speaking"

Barrie England has an interesting article on the subject at Real Grammar - http://realgrammar.posterous.com/between-you-i-and-the-gatepost

Incidentally, my search brought up another interesting use - "He liked her for what she was, not for who she was" - I presume "what" here refers to attributes, as porsche suggests, and "who" refers to her social position.

@AnWulf - because it's part of my identity and part of the language I see all around me every day. I simply use the same forms that practically every British publication (apart from those of the OUP) uses. I deeply respect American English, and if I were American I would be proud to use American forms and Americanisms, but I'm not, so I happily use the language forms of my own culture, just as I use British expressions such as "spot on" and "don't get your knickers in a twist". Not to mention Scotticisms like "doing the messages" (for the shopping) and "outwith". I'm afraid logic doesn't come into it much, it's just a matter of being comfortable with your identity. It seems to me that language and identity are deeply entwined. Much more so than language and logic.

In any case, as you hinted at, English is very much a non-phonetic language, so I don't think the odd -ise for -ize or u in colour is going to make a lot of difference - think of all those bough and rough and through words, for example. In any case, I don't really go for your phonetics argument, as verbs such as advertise, advise, apprise and arise end in -ise, on both sides of the Atlantic, and I can hear no difference in sound between them and other verbs with an -ize ending. And we have plenty of other examples of hard s in English.

Now you tell me why you like using these weird spellings of yours.

@chrisbolton20 - I think you have a point about the liquid vs pills thing, I certainly tend to think of medicine as being a liquid in a bottle. I can imagine a doctor saying "Are you on any sort of medication", using it as an all-embracing term.

@Hairy Scot - fair enough, but I haven't really noticed it being used that way. Nor as far as I'm aware, have I heard people using assemblage instead of assembly - do you have any examples?