Sorry - prepositional verb -"talk about" - not phrasal verb.

@Perfect Pedant - a bit late, but as somebody with Douglas connections, I wouldn't argue about anything to do with the borders with somebody called Percy. And as Percy says, Galashiels is of course pronounced /ɡæləˈʃiːəlz/ not /ɡɑːləˈʃiːəlz/ with an a as in cat, not a as in car. No doubt gala is pronounced /ɡɑːlə/ in Scotland as well as most of England, but equally, Durham is famous for its "gayla".

@Bengo - sorry to have prejudged you, and by your example, I assume you're Scottish. I am also Scottish and have the misfortune to be an RP speaker, which is a bit like being a foreigner in my own country, but unfortunately I can't put on a Scottish accent for the life of me.

I'm not convinced about the laziness argument; I think many people in Britain have two Englishes, a dialect version and "speaking proper" (very British expression) for wider communication. Horses for courses, you might say. And standard English itself was once just a West Midlands dialect (not modern West Midlands of course).

Dialects and accents are, after all, an important part of someone's identity (a part of my national identity I'm unfortunately missing). They are also part of our heritage and it is well known that the use of many traditional dialects is decreasing. Personally, I find that rather sad. Yes, there may be times when it might be better to use a more standard English, especially in writing, but I cannot see that standard English has any superiority over dialects. Linguists seem to recognise that most (if not all) languages and dialects are equally complex, and that - "Research clearly supports the position that variation in language is a natural reflection of cultural and community differences (Labov, 1972)." I think the article that I got that from, on guidelines for teaching a standard dialect sensitively, puts it rather better than I can.

http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/christ01.html

And lastly, personally I see this website as a place for discussing the fascinating world of language, not for upholding any perceived standards, although I'm no doubt in a minority - I'm just not into this right and wrong thing. In any case, some of the so-called rules put forward here, I find somewhat dubious, not to say spurious. :)

@Hairy Scot - joking aside, although I "-ise" every verb I possibly can, I also recognise that in British English we have a choice - and "-ize" is not in fact an Americanism. All Oxford University publications including, no doubt, your beloved OED use " -ize" as standard, and so until recently did the (London) Times. Nor I think, is there anything particularly American about "you know" and the use of "like" as a filler has been around in Britain since the late '60s, I remember using it in my hippy days, and I recently heard it on a British radio comedy recorded in 1961.

I'm not sure Brits are in any position to have a dig at Americans for vocabulary, unless you're Stephen Fry, that is.

As for going metric, we only half embraced it in Britain. You buy a 500ml bottle of beer in a shop, but a pint in a pub. Footpaths are signposted in kilometres, but roads are in miles, and you can still buy your loose ham in Imperial. And how about this headline from the Sun - "Lauren Peberdy was stunned when she gave birth to an 8lb 7oz baby boy"

Do you really want to force Americans to eat our chips: the ones that lie around in that animal fat for an hour or so? Don't they have heath problems enough already? Why not get them to eat chip butties while you're at it, or that West of Scotland delicacy, the deep-fried Mars Bar. (I kid you not). By the way, in Edinburgh chips are eaten with "sos" (sauce), a sort of vinegary HP, not vinegar. Personally I prefer proper "frites" (preferably made in Belgium, and topped with mayonnaise), with the occasional chips and "sos" for nostalgia's sake.

As for the rest of your joke, I'll leave it to our cousins across the water to decide on that one. I just hope, for your sake, they remember that irony is an important ingredient of British humour. But so is self-deprecation, which seems somewhat lacking here.

@porsche - you are quite right, I meant "to". I take your point about the indirect object, but the way we teach it in TEFL, and perhaps more widely too (see the second example in the second link), the term "indirect object" is usually reserved for non-prepositional use when it comes immediately after the verb and before the direct object, as in "He gave Michelle and me a hard time.", otherwise we tend to call it a prepositional phrase. And then the same rule works for all prepositions, not just "to" and "for". But I think both approaches are valid.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/function/inobj.htm
http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/prepositions_object_of_a_preposition.htm
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000018.htm

As I understand it, every preposition must have an object, usually called "the object of the preposition", and that's what I personally would call "Michelle and I (me)" here. Which is why, of course, some people insist on "whom" where I would say "Who was he talking about?", precisely because "who(m)" is the object of the preposition "about". No indirect object there. Although I suppose you could also see it as the direct object of the phrasal verb "talk about". Again, I think, both approaches are valid.

@bloops - nice variation on the song, and you're right about "can" for permission of course; "may" is seen as pretty formal nowadays. It reminds me of my schooldays long ago. If someone said - "Can I go to the toilet, please Sir", the teacher would invariably answer - "I don't know. Can you?"

@Frogwhisperer - 'He gave it to Michelle and me' - Michelle and me are the objects of the preposition 'it', so the pronoun should be in theory be in the object form (or objective case) - so me, not I, which is the subject form (or subjective case).

Checking with Ngram, the results for British books is not very surprising: 'book is/was entitled' leads 'book is/was titled' by quite a long way, and the same is true for 'film'. What surprised me though is that while 'book was titled' is becoming more popular in the American corpus, 'book is/was entitled' was also in the lead for the American corpus as well as the British corpus. And remember that these references are in proofread, edited and published books.

This might of course include 'was entitled to' , but clicking on the Google Books links at the bottom doesn't seem to show any like that. The second link is to the American corpus.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=book+was+entitled%2Cbook+was+titled%2Cbook+is+entitled%2Cbook+is+titled&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=book+was+entitled%2Cbook+was+titled%2Cbook+is+entitled%2Cbook+is+titled&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=

I thought for one shocking moment that Perfect Pedant had turned descriptivist, until I realised he was quoting from WorldWideWords. PP contrasts here two different attitudes to the question in hand, as if they were of equal weight. I'd just like to point out that WorldWideWords is a well-known and highly respected language site, and an excellent source for the meanings of all sorts of words and expressions, especially new ones. Its author, etymologist Michael Quinion, is also a contributor to the OED. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Quinion

On the other hand, as far as I can see, the writer at Buffam.com is a computer scientist with no special expertise in language, in other words, just a regular guy like you or me. And like you or me he is entitled to his opinions, of course, but I know who I'd trust more on questions of English.

Drat that extra that!