@Brus - And so do I, for once.
@Hairy Scot - I more or less agree with you, but as Brus says, 'will' suggests a decision at the moment of speaking (or at least that's how we teach it). For intention we usually use 'going to'.

There's also another possibility - to use present continuous, which we normally do to talk about future arrangements - We're having a cricket match tomorrow' - 'What are you doing at the weekend?'

In TEFL we teach four basic future forms:

'will' for decisions at the moment of speaking - I'll call you tomorrow
'going to' for intentions - I'm going to book my holiday tomorrow
present continuous for future arrangements - I'm meeting her for lunch tomorrow
present simple for scheduled events - Don't forget we have a meeting tomorrow.

From Macmillan Dictionary - get/keep/stay in contact: Do you and Jo still keep in contact? - seems pretty normal to me, Hairy Scot, although I'd probably say 'in touch' myself.

Nothing wrong with having pet peeves of course, as long as we realise they are just that, pet peeves, and have absolutely nothing to do with what is good or bad English. I have a few myself - awesome and going forward to start with. But they are only peeves, and that is all. The best way to deal with them is just not to use them. The trouble is that a lot of people elevate their particular peeves into 'rules' - they don't like it, so it must be wrong, even when they have no real grounds for thinking so.

@porsche - I agree.

@Percy - I agree with you about this not having anything to do with pretension. But I think it's fairly easy to see where the regulatory thing came from. In both pairs, mandate / mandatory and regulate / regulatory the first syllable is stressed in both the verb and adjective. But we also have the noun regulation, where the stress is on the third syllable, and no doubt that is affecting how people pronounce regulatory, although it doesn't explain the shift in mandatory, as mandate is stressed on the first syllable, not on the second.

@D.A.W. - Good to see you back on form! I'm not sure where you get MAN-di-TOR-ee from. English words normally only have one main stressed syllable, not two. As far as I and my dictionary are aware, all the stress is on the first syllable, as in this IPA rendering - / 'mændətəri / (note the apostrophe denoting the stress at the beginning). And as the third syllable is unstressed, we don't say TOR, but use the weak schwa sound (uh - in IPA - ə)

Similarly with regulatory: all the stress is on the first syllable. English is definitely not like French, an equal stress language, in this regard. And where I come from (and in my dictionary) economic is stressed on the third syllable, not on the first. Moreover, participate also has only one stressed syllable - the second - / pɑːˈtɪsɪpeɪt /.

Finally, I did a Google Translate of your word family into French - l'aérodynamique, l'électromagnétisme, hydraulique, de la linguistique, les mathématiques, la mécanique, l'optique, la physique, la statique, statistiques, ... et l'économie. - Perhaps it's not really so hard to fathom why they say economy when they mean economics. Their word family doesn't quite coincide with ours.

@joelackey92 - so what you are basically saying is that the dictionaries have got it all wrong, or as you put it, are struggling with the differences. Is that it?

a satire entitled ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’ (Oxford Dictionaries Online)
He entitled his book “My Life on Mars.” (Merriam-Webster Online)
to call by a particular title or name: What was the book entitled? (Dictionary.com)
to give a title to a book, poem, or piece of music - Her first novel was entitled More Innocent Times. (Macmillan Dictionary)
the book is entitled “Commentaries on the Laws of England” (Wordnik)
entitle - to give a title or name to (Webster's New World College Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary 4)
entitle - late 14c., "to give a title to a chapter, book, etc.," (Online Etymology Dictionary - the other meaning came a century later)

But I'm sure you know best. It's obviously so simple, and these dictionary writers are clearly all charlatans.

@Thredder - the content of your comment made me equally content, unlike some of the contents of this thread. It certainly seems to be a contentious issue, although I have to say I find that some of the comments are a bit high in nonsense content.

@the Table of Content fans - The content of a book is its subject matter and the actual writing (eg 'it's all style and no content'); the various chapters are its contents (things that are contained in something). Look at your cereal packet, it talks about the contents, not the content. The Table of Contents is simply a list of chapters, not a guide to the content of the book; that's the job of the blurb. Just check a dictionary.

@Julian Freeman and Sara Malam - I don't know about the US, but in the UK it's exactly the opposite - if you want to sound educated, you follow UKAnon and say somebody hanged themselves, as any (British) dictionary will tell you:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hang
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/hang#hang_6

If you want to sound not quite so educated or couldn't give a damn either way, you say people are hung (and people like me will wince - silently). But for everyone, things, of course, are hung.

Try googling table of content without inverted commas, and nearly every entry is for table of contents. Use inverted commas to narrow the search, and it comes up with about 3 million to 186 million for the contents version. In Google Books it's 42,000 to just under 25 million. That's less than 2% for the singular version in general search, and less than 0.2 percent in Google Books. Table of Contents is what we are all used to seeing in books, and I don't suppose publishers think they are 'relegating the worth of a book to its size rather than its content.' As glee says, it's much the more natural choice.

What do people have against the standard idiomatic English that everyone understands, that they want to replace it with some unnatural sounding phrase for the sake of some perceived 'grammatical correctness', whose validity is pretty doubtful anyway? What is so wrong with natural English?

Hi Jasper, maybe just. It's in Google Books, but not much of it is available - if you put this into your address bar, you should be able to see just enough.

http://books.google.pl/books?hl=pl&id=eJ5AAQAAIAAJ&q=However,%20the%20verb%20is%20usually%20third-person,%20especially%20in%20an%20informal%20style
(the inverted commas are important!)

Or you can google Michael Swan, Practical English Usage, go to Google Books and enter the "However ..." stuff in the search box (in inverted commas). It's also on Amazon, but unfortunately it's not playing ball. I have the Second Edition 1995 in front of me, where it's on p 495, in a section on 'relatives - advanced points' - 5 agreement of person.

I don't know if you know this book, but it is just about the 'bible' for many British EFL teachers like me. Wikipedia calls it 'a standard reference book aimed at foreign learners of English and their teachers', although I imagine it's used more by teachers than learners.

I think you have to look at each pair / trio separately; I don't think you can draw a hard and fast principle that covers all. I agree with Dyske about horrifical and feministical, so let's look at the rest, starting with the easiest ones.

ecclesiastic - only a noun
ecclesiastical, ecclesial - both adjectives, and apparently synonymous. The latter seems to be very formal and apparently was rarely used before the 1960s (Oxford) - I'd never heard it before and it's not in any of the five advanced learner's dictionaries I checked. I think this might be mainly and American usage.

fantastic and fantastical - both adjectives, and for the meanings of 'strange and showing a lot of imagination' and 'impossible to put into practice', they are synonymous, but of course, fantastic has other meanings, such as great, brilliant, amazing, etc, which fantastical doesn't have.

The difference between comic and comical as adjectives is the most difficult to explain. For categorisation, we use comic - a comic actor, a comic opera, a comic genius etc. Comical is used more for situations, and my dictionary suggests it has an extra meaning - 'funny or amusing because of being strange or unusual'. When we use it about people it has a bit of a negative quality, I think. We laugh at somebody who is comical, rather than laugh with them.

It's quite common in Scottish dialect - 'Hands off, it's mine's', especially I think with children. And it does have a certain logic, as JJMBallantyne points out. Another one in the west of Scotland is yous, not as a possessive, but as a plural form of (the already plural) you - 'I'll see yous all later'.

@bengo - I wouldn't come to Britain if I were you: every city has its own dialect. And in peaktime TV soap operas, you'll often hear expressions like 'Well, it wasn't me what done it' or 'I ain't see him nowhere' - features common in some London dialects -'what' instead of 'who' or 'which', past participle ('done') instead of preterite ('did'), double negatives. It may not be standard English, but it's quite comprehensible to the rest of us. And it is the standard English in many communities - it's those of use who 'speak proper' who stand out as the oddities. If everyone around you is speaking in dialect, then it's that dialect which is the main 'communication system'. Why on Earth should be people who speak in dialect, who might never have to use more formal English in their daily lives, be considered lazy?

A joke from black stand-up comedian Reginald D Hunter, who's from Georgia, but lives in Britain. Hunter speaks perfect standard English, but does most of his act in a Southern drawl.

British woman: What do you know about Tommy Cooper? (A British comedian)
Hunter: He dead!
British woman: I must be terribly British and correct your grammar; I think it's 'he died'.
Hunter: At first he died, and now he dead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU7L3D8Ndqo