@Brus - just noticed something you said. British people virtually never refer to themselves as Britons. This is mainly used by newspapers and to
talk of the ancient Britons.

@Brus - except that, for many of us, especially in the UK, the subjunctive is largely dead. And this is only the natural conclusion of a process that has been going on in English for centuries. Many educated people in Britain say 'if I was' for hypothetical situations - in standard BrE you now have a choice, and that's what foreigners learning English are taught, although they are warned to use 'were' in more formal situations.

Secondly, the result clause of a hypothetical conditional is most definitely not in the subjunctive, it uses a modal. Just as in romance languages the if clause is in the subjunctive mood, but the result clause is in the conditional mood. The subjunctive in English has only two independent forms, the base form of the verb in the present - 'it is vital that he be at the meeting' (this is hardly ever used in BrE), and 'were' for all forms of be in past simple. Otherwise it is identical to the indicative. So this 'was / were' thing is really the only other time that the question of the subjunctive arises. And not surprisingly, as for every person of 'be' other than 1st and 3rd person singular, and for every other verb, the past subjunctive is identical to the indicative, many of us use the indicative for everything. Modern grammar reference books don't even call this the subjunctive any more, but the Irrealis. In EFL teaching we call it the unreal past.

@Jasper - I know the - 'if it's him, it must be whom test' - the only problem is that it is totally out of touch with reality. Yes, 'Whom does the new tax proposal really benefit' is correct in formal grammar, but very few people talk like that. What I don't accept is that in normal informal conversation we are bound by the rules of formal grammar. Or that something which sounds unnatural should be considered more 'correct' than something that sounds natural.

I teach English to foreigners and it is absolutely standard in course books to say that 'whom' is regarded as very formal, and is usually avoided by native speakers. We teach that the only time it's necessary to use 'whom' it is after a preposition. And you can often avoid the problem altogether by stranding the preposition. Current EFL books would not teach 'Whom does the new tax proposal really benefit', but 'Who ...'. So it really depends on your definition of correct. You can read more of my take on his here:

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/07/q-when-do-we-use-whom-instead-of-who.html

Pronouns are the biggest area of change in English because they are the only vestiges left of the case system which English has largely dumped. This is an ongoing process. Most of us say 'it's me' rather than 'it's I', 'he's bigger than me', not he's bigger than I', but there are people out there who insist the vast majority of us are incorrect. What is a language? A method of communicating effectively in a natural way or a set of hidebound rules, many of which turn out to be the results of some grammarian or other's whim in the 18th or 19th century.

@Brus - innit? From you? I'm truly shocked! It's OK I know you're only joking. In the UK we say 'sit' or 'take' a test or exam, but I don't think I've ever heard 'write' an exam in BrE. It's my impression that 'sit' is more common when talking of more formal exams, for example at university. I think it's more common to say 'sit your finals' than 'take your finals', and I don't think this is anything new. And if you have redo an exam, I think resit is more common than retake, although both are possible. And as a noun it's definitely more common - 'Students are only allowed one resit'. Perhaps this is a BrE / AmE thing? I think the main problem for me though, is that it sounds very strange in the passive - 'a lot of exams were sat' - it's a bit weird.

Nothing wrong with Raymond Chandler; I like a good detective yarn. But it was people like Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson who excited people like me in my generation. I'll leave their respective merits to the literary critics, but Mailer's sentence is fine for me. I simply observe; I don't judge.

@Jackie - Are you sure 'which' is disappearing in 'international speak'? My students almost never use 'that' instead of 'which' as a relative pronoun as the different uses of 'which' in English coincide with one Polish word, while the Polish word for 'that' is never used as a pronoun. But in French it is different, 'qui' being the subject relative pronoun and 'que' being the object relative pronoun. Not only is 'que' also the French word for the conjunction 'that', but French has different words for interrogative 'which' - 'quel' etc. So for French people, it might be easier to use 'that'. But I think this is a very specific case.

Correction - 'for example' should read 'such as'

@Brus & @Jackie - unfortunately I have to agree wholeheartedly with you Brus. I didn't read Jackie's post properly (for which I apologise Jackie) and started barking up the wrong tree about 'like', which I realised, to my horror, in the middle of the night. But I stick absolutely to what I said about relative pronouns, the history of which are well documented.

I think the sort of use Jackie was talking about was something like '' ... and looked like we were a pretty good combination", or "... middle-aged men who looked like they might be out for their one night of the year." The first, incidentally, is from Harry S.Truman, and the second from Norman Mailer.

Burchfield in the New Fowler's says that their are plenty examples from good AmE and Australian sources, but that it is much less common in BrE. MWDEU says this use is common after certain verbs - feel, look and sound, for example.This example is from BBC Radio 4 - "It looks like Terry Waite will leave for London in a couple of days." And some have become idiomatic - "She's studying like mad". I don't think "as if mad" would really work there.

I don't think I'd use 'like' in this way in formal writing, but I can't really see the harm of it in casual conversation or in an off-the-cuff remark.

But Jackie has thrown up an interesting point (and a possible topic for my blog) - 'like' has so many disputed uses:

as - "We are overrun with them, like the Australians were by rabbits" (Churchill)
as is /as though - see above
for example - "German cars, like Mercedes"
as a general filler - see above
about, or indicating surprise? - "There were like three hundred people there."
said - "He was like 'how are you', and I was like 'fine.'"
Don't worry, I don't use the last one, but there's a wicked parody of it here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IINcyiB2JJc - Warning: contains the 'F-word', but only once, at the end.

As for an Academie Anglaise, a group calling themselves the "Queen's English Society" tried to do this recently and failed miserably. They disbanded a couple of months ago, much to the mirth of the linguistics blogosphere.

@Brus = 'nuff said (if you'll excuse the colloquialism). But to get back to expat. English pubs and Irish pubs (which rarely have much to do with Ireland) in other countries are not the same as expat bars. Expat bars are where people living and working in a foreign country go. In Warsaw they are just as likely to be Polish pubs as any other. And it is hard to find a more efficient way of talking about the expat community. Or for example saying that you like to avoid the expat scene. One word and everyone understands what you mean. And foreigner really won't do, because the word expat is used when I'm talking with other native speakers, to whom I'm definitely not a foreigner. (Couldn't get out of using the dreaded 'whom' there!)

@Jackie- the use of 'like' as a filler is nothing new. I'm of the hippy generation, and we used it a lot back in the late sixties. I was listening to an old radio comedy, Beyond Our Ken, from 1961 on Radio 4 Extra the other day, and one character asked another what he was called. 'You mean, like what's my name?' he answered - The idea that this is anything new is pure myth; it goes back at least to the Beat generation (1950s). And the funny thing is that the foreign students I hear using 'like' most are the well-educated ones who have travelled and done things like go on Erasmus. Nearly everybody I know (including me) uses 'like' as a filler in informal conversation. And as you can see I'm no youngster. Nor do I speak American slang, or any other kind of slang for that matter.

Again 'that' being used instead of 'which' in defining relative clauses is also nothing new; and although most of the support for this practice is in America, it has nothing to do with slang; quite the opposite, it is the American grammar mavens and quality press who insist on this. What's more, it was originally the idea of the very British H.W.Fowler to replace 'which' with 'that', back in 1926.

And the use of 'that' instead of 'who', also in defining relative clauses, is much more frowned on in America than in Britain. And again it's nothing new, going back at least as far as Chaucer. In British course books for teaching foreigners, 'who' and 'that' for people, and 'which' and 'that' for things are all seen as perfectly acceptable. Because that's what most of us do - interchange them at will. And of course, when the relative pronoun refers to the object, we tend to drop it altogether - 'He's the man I love'.

And sorry, but for me one of the great glories of English is that it doesn't have anything like the Academie Française, which most French people ignore anyway, to stifle it.

@Brus - I didn't think you were criticising me for being British; we may have our disagreements, but I know you're not that bad. Of course all of us indulge in attacking each other's arguments, but I think it's a bit of a slippery slope if we start directly attacking the language that other people use in their comments. Call me old fashioned, but I find that rather bad manners. A few people on the opposite side to me in these debates use what I consider pretty pompous and over-formal language, but I'd never dream of calling it 'horrible'. I did say somewhere else about an expression you used, that I wouldn't personally use it, but I admitted it was quite correct and I certainly didn't use this sort of emotive language. Sorry if I'm over-reacting.

As for Brits, it's just a bit of shorthand. I don't see the connection with Yanks and Frogs as these are not normally used by the inhabitants of those countries. I regularly read and occasionally comment on 'Separated by a 'common language', an excellent website run by an American linguist working in Britain on the differences between American and British English, where the word Brits is regularly used as a form of shorthand. Just because Americans don't like being called Yanks and French don't like being called Frogs, doesn't mean we Brits have to reject such a useful word.

And as for expat, it doesn't simply mean foreigner or foreign (it's also an adjective). I live and work in Warsaw. Saying I'm an expat is rather shorter than saying I'm a foreigner living and working here. What's more, there are certain pubs that are popular with British and Americans living and working here, and so they are known as expat pubs. As well as being longer, calling them pubs that foreigners go to wouldn't have the same meaning; they could just be for tourists. Expat has a very precise meaning, presumably just as farang has.