Sorry I gave the wrong reference for Merriam-Webster. It should have been:

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/blog.php?action=ViewBlogArticle&ba_id=86

@Jeremy Wheeler - not to mention UK parliament rather than British parliament, that saves a whole eight letters, so that must make it much better English. It's funny how this efficiency lark only seems to apply to certain words, but not to arguments or sticking to the point.

@Perfect Pedant and DAW - except most of it's tosh - modals have nothing to do with the subjunctive - except in German. if you want to compare English to Romance languages, for examples - 'would' and 'could' are equivalent to conditional mood and not subjunctive. (English doesn't have a conditional mood - i.e. a separate inflected form of the verb and German seems to combine subjunctive and conditional in one mood). None of the examples A-E are what is understood to be the subjunctive in English. That they may be in German is neither here nor there.

@D.A.W. 2. you haven't actually answered my question: the latest Star Trek movie or the newest Star Trek movie?

3. "As for those lazy dog writers who do this anyway, let's stamp them out like elephants." - sorry but I don't see how that means "Lazy writers will inevitably start writing ..."

4. I'm an English teacher, and most of the people who comment here have a pretty good understanding of language, so please spare us the patronising parts of speech lesson. We know what a noun is and we know what an adjective is (and what about 'select', by the way, you haven't answered that one either). And we also know what we mean when we say a noun is used, or functions as an adjective. I suggest you look at a grammar book (any one will do) before pontificating to us that it's more complicated than we believe.

You presumably deliberately chose a word - glass - that dictionaries list as both noun and adjective, and the same could be said for any materials. But what about Jeremy's list? - car door, clothes shop, race horse, accounts department, arms production, research centre, team coach, football team, dog food, coffee cup, cookie jar. - None of these classifying words are listed in dictionaries as adjectives, but they are all modifying the second noun and performing an adjectival role.

@D.A.Wood - a few links about using nouns as adjectives for you, although I know you'll completely ignore them:

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/blog.php?action=ViewBlogArticle&ba_id=33
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/noun-as-adjective.html
http://www.brighthub.com/education/languages/articles/37060.aspx

'But' to mean 'except' has a long history - 'There but for the grace of God, go I' - 'I had no choice but to sign the contract'. - so, as others have said, the literal meaning of 'all but' is pretty close to 'everything except' - 'He all but killed me' - 'He did everything except kill me'. In fact the Free dictionary gives two meanings - everything (or everybody) except and almost.

Ironically Jun-Dai seems to have got closest to the mark. It's an idiom, it doesn't need to be analysed to death. And like scyllacat I suspect, I've never experienced the slightest misunderstanding when either using or hearing it. What's more, it was good enough for Shakespeare, apparently.

And Rich, if 'I'm all but finished', technically speaking yes it's true that I haven't (quite) finished yet (that's the only way I can see how 'all but' can mean 'not'). But the implied meaning is very different from 'I'm not finished' - Consider you're on a long boring walk - 'We're all but there' would be quite positive, while 'We're not there' would be rather negative. I don't really think you've proved anything to be terrible.:)

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/all+but

@D.A.Wood - Just in case you can remember what your original question was, would you say the 'latest' Start Trek movie (you seem to be a fan) or the 'newest' Star Trek movie. If something is part of a sequence, I'd think I'd tend to say 'latest'. And don't we usually talk about the 'latest model' of something rather than the 'newest model'.

Amongst all the off-topic stuff you said something about 'select' which seems to have gone unnoticed - 'they use "select" when they needed "selected", and they use "chose" when they needed "chosen"', and you say that people don't know the difference between an adjective, a noun and a verb. Well I've never heard anybody use 'chose' for 'chosen', but 'select' most definitely is an adjective as well as being a verb - 'They live in a very select area'. - you couldn't say 'selected' there, and I would argue that 'only a select few' has a different meaning from 'only a selected few'.

You say nouns cannot be adjectives, when they obviously can and commonly are (they're known as nominal modifiers, I believe). But when anybody suggests a list of common nouns used as adjectives, you avoid the issue and just harp on about when we can and can't use US as an adjective, and even then ignoring Jeremy's example of the US press, which as far as I know isn't part of the US government yet, although it might have looked that way for a few years.

http://www.grammar-quizzes.com/adj_nounmodifiers.html

And who are these so-called 'lazy dog writers' who confuse England with English etc, Can you provide any examples.

@Jeremy, you have my sympathies.

@D.A.W. Wood - I 'dug back into the 14th century' because thebestcook seemed to think that 'entitled' was a recent interloper, when in fact it was the older word for this meaning. I wasn't disparaging the use of 'titled', only defending the use of 'entitled'. You of course have a choice, but why try and force that choice on others?

I suppose you never say 'enormous' or 'gigantic', but only 'huge'. And if you take this efficiency to its logical conclusion, we'd all be going round grunting words of one syllable; they're certainly efficient.

Personally I would say - Jane wrote a book called - ‘How to win at the lottery’ and wouldn't use either 'entitled' or 'titled', but that's simply my choice.

For those interested there's an article about 'entitle' at MWDEU - http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA401

Both meanings are acceptable according to Oxford Dictionaries Online. And Online Etymology Dictionary gives the meaning of 'to give a title to a chapter or book' as actually being older (14th C) than the meaning of entitling somebody to something (15th C), so if anything the change has gone the other way. Dave may well be right because I think I (BrE) would be more inclined to say a book or film was entitled "Bla Bla Bla' than titled 'Bla Bla Bla'.

With 'have (got) to', it seems to me to depend on the surrounding words. I (BrE) am more likely to say I've got to go', than 'I've to go', but 'I've to be there at eight' sounds fine.

Similarly I'm probably more likely to say 'I've got an idea' than 'I've an idea', but conversely, 'I've no idea' rather than 'I've got no idea'. It just depends how it trips off the tongue.

The number of Google hits for each of the phrases I've mentioned seem to suggest that my instincts are reasonably correct. 'I've got a headache', for example, gets more than 10 times the number of hits on Google as 'I've a headache'.

Can't see why any reason to think it's wrong. Here's an example sentence given in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary - ‘What's she talking about?’ ‘I've no idea.’ And there are plenty of examples of both ‘I've no idea' and 'I'd no idea' in Google Books. If we can contract lexical 'be' (I'm a writer, she's a doctor etc), why not lexical 'have'.