@jack et. al.- not to mention the fact that even in Latin, vocative is not used with "I", unless that is of course, that you are in the habit of going around addressing yourself - O I!.

Perhaps if people weren't continually being 'corrected' for using perfectly good natural English utterances like 'He's taller than me' , 'She's the same age as me', and Hi, it's me', there would be a bit less hypercorrection.

@jack et. al.- goofy's comment was totally pertinent to the discussion, even if, I think, a bit tongue in cheek.. - "you, and I" in that Shakespearean sentence are objects of the prepositional verb "exclaimed on". In any case in this scene, where Grey is talking to Rivers while awaiting their execution, Hastings isn't present, so it couldn't possibly be vocative, even if such a case existed in English, which I would dispute. Nor would vocative make sense with the line that follows - "for standing by ...". In modern English, it might go something like 'When she publicly named Hastings, you and me for standing by ...'

@Cheryl in France - I wonder what linguists you're talking about; the terms I see most often on linguistics sites are AmE and BrE, at for example - http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2012/10/briticisms-in-ame.html

Well-known linguist Ben Yagoda refers to American and British English on his blog - http://britishisms.wordpress.com/about/

And the main corpora that linguists use are COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American) and the BNC (British National Corpus)

@chancery.co - Nobody can argue with that, but that wasn't the question. Where do books and films etc come into your scheme of things?

Although for me Lego is uncountable, I fully accept JMick's point about different customs in different places. And goofy is right to point out that what the company says is neither here nor there when it comes to everyday usage. Remember how Google complained when the OED listed the eponymous verb as being a general term for searching the internet using any search engine, not just Google - do any of us bother with that?

But I wonder if this happens with any other kit names, for example Meccano - 'How many Meccanos did you use to make that bridge?' - sounds a bit weird to me.

@theshockdoctrin and Jasper - Yes, the subject is unclear at first, and the sentence needs to be read a few times to get the meaning, but I think 'they' are meant to be 'the years after the Oslo Accords' or perhaps the Oslo Accords themselves; it depends if you think a time period can 'deliver' anything. My version might be:

"In Israel, in the years following the Oslo Accords, the agreements delivered on their promise of trading conflict for prosperity in a dramatic fashion."

@steve3 - so perhaps you should read this from linguist Gabe at Motivated Grammar:

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/

Or this at MWDEU - http://books.google.pl/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA415

Or this compendium of examples from literature taken from the OED and elsewhere - http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html

Or Oxford Dictionaries Online - http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/they

I bet you don't accept the passive either. But I'm sure you know best.

That should be - for 'many TEFL teachers', not 'any'.

@Hairy Scot - unfortunately you don't say what the Independent article was about, but all the recent instances of liquid water I've found in the newspaper refer to cosmology, apart from one which is about the Antarctic. The most recent, from 11 October is in an article about a newly discovered planet with "surface temperatures reaching a blistering 2,150C with no possibility of liquid water and therefore life." - I think for cosmologists and geologists the state of that water is very important in terms of supporting life. I think what you've stumbled across is simply a scientific term, used especially amongst cosmologists and perhaps geologists, and nothing to get worried about.

If I can give an analogy - to the general public 'Classical music' means a type of composed 'serious' music written any time between the 17th century (or even earlier) and today. But to musicians themselves, Classical Music is a much more specific term, referring to a particular style of music composed between about 1750 and 1820.

Just as until I started reading language websites I thought redundancy more or less only related to people being laid off work. The way you use it is very specific and probably not known to the general public, (in Britain at least; I think this is rather an American preoccupation). It doesn't even appear in the index of Michael Swan's Practical English Usage, the bible for any TEFL teachers. But on this forum you're speaking to a relatively specialist audience (some of whom seem to think this is a very important issue) and you use it in a way you assume they'll understand.

What I'm trying to say here is that specialists often use words in different ways to the general public, and as you originally said, you have seen this mainly in science reports, and I would hazard a guess, mainly to do with cosmology. I'd be interested if you can give us any examples of the term 'liquid water' being used outside articles on cosmology or geology.

http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionUniqueName=search&publicationName=ind&sortString=publishdate&sortOrder=desc§ionId=506&articleTypes=news&pageNumber=1&pageLength=10&startDay=1&startMonth=1&startYear=2010&useSectionFilter=true&useHideArticle=true&searchString=%22liquid+water%22

@Hairy Scot - Is it mainly about Mars that you have been hearing it? It seems to be used quite a bit to talk about water on Mars and other cosmic bodies such as Jupiter's moon Europa.

There seems to be a good reason, in line with what Bruce François said. Firstly, scientists are obviously interested in the presence of water, to see if life could have been possible. But most water on these bodies seems to exist (or have existed) as ice or as vapour, so when they find evidence of running water, they simply use the term liquid water to differentiate it from those other states.

What's more, there also seems to be dry ice (CO2) on Mars, so they need to use the term water ice for the H2O variety rather than just saying ice, just as we refer to water vapour, to distinguish it from any other type of vapour..

I think this is probably simply a scientific convention to avoid any confusion rather than anyone trying to be clever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice