Hi Jim, I confess to the last one occasionally, but this may be more of a British thing - this is from Practical English Usage by Michael Swan, a bible for EFL teachers:

"Object forms are sometimes used in co-ordinated subjects with *and* in informal speech; this is considered incorrect in more formal usage - 'John and me are going skiing this weekend' (more correct: John and I)"

In fact for some strange reason, with this informal use it's usually 'me first'. As I said, I hear it quite a lot from people who use otherwise absolutely Standard English, and would never dream of using 'ain't', for example.

As for infer and imply, like you I make the distinction (and teach my students to do the same), but the horse has long bolted on that one, so (to mix my metaphors), there's not much point in crying over spilt milk. In any case, I don't think there's usually much ambiguity; if I did happen to say 'Are you inferring I'm a liar?' we both know what I mean from context.

Why do people do it? Because they pick it up from others, exactly the same as they acquire any other words. Why should we feel the need to question something we are used to seeing. For example, for at least thirty years I only knew the expression "to beg the question" as meaning "to invite/raise" the question, because that's by far and away its most common use. It's only fairly recently that I discovered its original use to describe a logical fallacy.

In fact almost all these controversial alternative uses are clear from context. It's usually pretty clear from context if someone is using 'decimate' to mean totally devastate or as a weird and wonderful military punishment. Similarly, there's never much doubt about how 'beg the question' is being used - I've written a piece on my blog about that one.

I just don't buy the argument that newer uses blur or weaken the original meanings. In English we have lots of words with multiple meanings, which give us no problems in comprehension (although lots of scope for puns) - "right (at least 3 meanings), mean (I wrote an exercise with 10 meanings), fair (ditto with 10), just (ditto with 14)"

I'm not particularly bothered by *myself *, myself, perhaps because I'm Scottish, where it's much more common - "And how's yourself today?"

Burchfield, in the Third Edition of Fowler's, finds the use of myself in a non-emphatic or non-reflexive role (i.e. instead of me) "irreproachable" when it comes after *and*, quoting something he himself had written, which is pretty close to your example:

"... a monitoring exercise undertaken by Professor Denis Donaghue, Mr Andrew Timothy and myself ..."

But obviously something like "The talk will be given by myself" is a bit silly.

I sometimes wonder, however, do we really choose these peeves ourselves, or are they something we pick up from teachers and people around us? Imply/infer, for example is pretty widely complained about on the Internet, but nobody (except me, apparently) bothers about the weakening (in my view) of 'awesome'. But I can live with it.

@jayles - Neither. I think you're trying to force an answer where one isn't necessary, as we are unlikely to use either:

"I think I know who stole the petty cash; it was Janice!"
"Really? Which Janice?
"John's secretary. She was the only person who had the time and opportunity to copy the key to the safe."
"But it could have been you yourself!"
"Are you saying that I'm the one who has the time and opportunity to copy the key? Is that what you're saying?

But on the occasions when we might use this construction:

informal - "it was her/me who did it"
formal - "it was she/I who did it"

"Object forms are common (in informal English), for example, in one-word answers and after the verb be: 'It's me that needs help' " - Michael Swan - Practical English Usage

Hi Jim. Try Googling it the other way round, i.e. for "pre-plan".Go to page 2 (past all the definitions) and it's nearly all for funeral services.

As for dictionaries, being a teacher, I nearly always use learner's dictionaries, which tend to give quite good usage notes, and comment on acceptability. Although I have to confess that none of the the four standard learner's dictionaries in fact list preplan / pre-plan.

Incidentally I'd say there's a difference between:

nonstandard - I ain't never seen him. He were sat at the bar.
colloquial or informal - I kind of like him. I'll pop over and see you this evening.
controversial /acceptability - He's taller than me, Hi, it's me. Who's that? Only me.
He inferred that I was a liar (see next paragraph)

For 'me' Oxford Advanced Learner's (OALD) has the note: "The use of me in the last three examples is correct in modern standard English. I in these sentences would be considered much too formal for almost all contexts, especially in British English.

On infer, OALD has a usage note that includes this:

"Infer is now often used with the same meaning as imply. However, many people consider that a sentence such as Are you inferring that I’m a liar? is incorrect, although it is fairly common in speech."

This is the approach I like: they tell you the situation and leave the choice to you.

Colloquial and controversial, and I suppose some people would say non-standard, although I wouldn't, as it's used informally by people who speak absolutely standard English and not dialect - Me and John are going to the pub - but none of my learner's dictionaries dare include that one.

@Jasper - I wouldn't think so much about which goes with which tense; it's the meaning that is important. Second and third conditionals are both about hypothetical or unreal conditions:

Second is about a condition and result in the present or future - If I won the lottery, I'd jump for joy - which is still, in theory at least, could still happen

Third is about a condition and result in the past which you can't now do anything about - If I'd won the lottery last year, I'd have gone to the London Olympics. - But I didn't, and there's nothing I can do about it now.

So Third is never real or open. To use a real or open (only possible when talking about the general past) just use normal past tenses, as I suggested in my previous post.

So, I'm still at bit of a loss - "...although Marai was not lost but, if he were, he would descend rather slowly into the superstition of the lesovik." - not knowing the context makes it a bit more difficult. The bit before might help, as would knowing what the superstition of the lesovik is.

The important thing is the getting lost bit. Is this something he might do in general (where we could use 'when or whenever', or are we talking about the possibility only at that moment? If it's the latter, as I suspect, I think you need Third Conditional - if he had been (lost), he would have descended rather slowly into the superstition of lesovik. (But he wasn't, so he didn't).

If it's something that could happen more than once, then I think you need 'was' not 'were'. What you've got at the moment has the same form as a Second conditional but it isn't a Second conditional, as that only refers to the present or future (on a particular occasion).

And if this is the case, the meaning of 'would' here is different from the meaning of 'would' in a Second conditional - it's the same as in the first example - would descend, used to descend, descended.

Real present (1st) - If he's lost, he'll surely phone for help
Unreal present (2nd) - If he were / was lost, he would surely call for help
Real present general (Zero) - If (or when) he's lost, he always phones for help.

Real past open (on a specific occasion) - not possible - the past is the past
Unreal past (3rd) - If he had been lost, he would have called for help
Real past general (Zero in the past) - If (or when) he was lost, he called /used to call / would call for help

@Jasper
(1) "If it were ever mentioned, which happened very little, Fei Forest would sometimes be referred to as the Crescent Forest because of how it curves around Braunvour Gulf."

OK, this falls into the class of true rather than a hypothetical conditional (even if it happened rarely) and basically uses past forms in both clauses. I would use 'was' rather than 'were' here, because when it was referred to as Crescent Forest, it obviously was being mentioned; nothing unreal or hypothetical there. As for the the 'would be', this is simply a way of expressing past habit and doesn't really express modality (for me) - it could equally well (grammatically, though not necessarily stylistically) be 'used to be referred to' or simply 'was sometimes referred to'.

(2) "...although Marai was not lost but, if he were, he would descend rather slowly into the superstition of the lesovik."

I don't quite follow this, partly because I'm a bit confused by the 'although' and 'but' in the same clause, but mainly because 'although Marai was not lost' sounds to me as though you're talking about a specific occasion, but then the conditional seems to be about a general condition in the past (my Zero in the past), which says that whenever he was lost he would descend into ... etc.

If that's the case, I think that 'were' is again inappropriate, because the fact that 'he would descend rather slowly' sounds as though it really happened, on the occasions when the condition was fulfilled, so this is a real condition, not a hypothetical one.

If, on the other hand, this is all about what he didn't do on a specific occasion, we need Third conditional - 'Marai was not lost. But if he had been, he would have descended ... ' etc.

I am a great fan of Neil Whitman and am a regular follower of his blog, Literal-Minded. But I have serious misgivings about that GrammarGirl piece (and others where he tries to teach grammar to non-specialists) , where he dismissed the 1,2,3 system without any great understanding about its details, its flexibility for different levels, and it what it's for - he admitted on his blog that he had very little experience of it and went to one website (which wasn't one of the big ESL or EFL ones) which gave a very strict interpretation of it, whereas the system jayles outlined is more fluid, for example being able to use any present tense in first conditional rather than just present simple, which is what students learn at lower levels, to keep things uncomplicated.

His whole criticism of it seemed to be based on the fact that you couldn't use it to categorise the sentence "If he died fighting, why didn’t they tell us about it?" which is about as obscure a conditional as you could imagine (and nowhere to be seen on the web, other than in this article or others referring to it). As jayles has said, the 1,2,3 system is to help people form true conditionals, not analyse every sentence that contains an 'if clause. As I commented on that piece, I don't consider this to be a true conditional, because the result is no dependent on the condition - it really means 'If it's the case that he died fighting, why didn't they tell us?'

@providencejim - I think you're right about ''based out of' not being used in the UK; at last I haven't heard it, although I'm now living outwith the UK anyway. I wouldn't use it myself, but it doesn't really bother me if somebody else does. As a language teacher I've come to realise that there is very little logic in the way we use prepositions, and it is as much idiomatic as anything else.

Back to preventative / preventive: I actually think I use both depending on the context; I think I'm more likely to say preventative medicine but preventive measures for example. It's possible I use preventive when it seems to be more about stopping people doing things, or it might just be what sounds better with the next word.

I don't really see how an extra couple of letters makes a word more ornate. As one commenter on this forum once said, should you always say 'huge' and never 'enormous', just because it's shorter? Burchfield, in the Third Edition of Fowler's personally prefers 'preventive' and 'orient', but says both forms are acceptable in each case, and of 'orientated' - 'one can have no fundamental quarrel with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words'.

I have a funny feeling this idea that shorter is always better is rather more popular in the States than in Britain. Personally I prefer to have a choice; there's the way words sound for example. I use both among and amongst, for example, depending, I think, on what follows. For example, if the next word starts with a vowel, I imagine I'm more likely to use amongst.

Re: pre-plan. Yes planning is always done in advance, but look at how different people plan for Christmas. Some start in June, others leave it to the last minute - I see no reason why we can't say that the former do their planning well in advance. I would see pre-planning as planning before it's normally considered necessary, such as pre-planning your own funeral for example (this appears to be overwhelmingly what it's used for!). I must confess, however, that I don't ever remember using it myself and it doesn't appear to be used much in the British media. And although I'm loth to condemn it out of hand, I'm certainly not advocating its use.

As for Oxford Dictionaries, their only criteria are whether a word or expression is reasonably widely used, and how people use it; it's not a matter of accepting it or not. The new editor of the OED has recently pointed out that the OED has always been descriptive, even if some people have elevated it into some sort of bible. And as I see it, it's a dictionary's primary job to tell us what words mean, and if their use is controversial, to give us the present position. For example the (London) Times has an article from 2006 on 'How to handle exam stress', in which they tell a reader 'You need to pre-plan more'. Now if a dictionary doesn't tell me what that means, as far as I'm concerned, it isn't doing its job. But it's not a dictionary's job to make value judgements. Having said that, only a few dictionaries seem to list pre-plan.

But it for me it always comes back to the same thing - everyone can make their own choices about the words and expressions they us, and with a few exceptions mine would probably be pretty similar to yours. But I'm not going to get too bothered if other people's choices don't always coincide with mine.

Come on. Up to speed, you two; selfie is so last month. This month's word is shelfie.

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/open-dictionary/entries/shelfie.htm

And there are more meanings at the Urban Dictionary.

I'd suggest that there is a slight difference:

"You are going to be based in the NY office" = you will spend most of your time working in the NY office.
"You are going to be based out of the NY office" = you'll be spending quite a lot of time on the road, but the NY office will be your base.
(In this second context, in BrE at least, we also say - "You'll be working out of the NY office")

Take that example from the U.S. Small Business Administration website. I doubt most of these people are actually doing business in their homes, in terms of dealing with customers etc. In fact that website also refers to "home-based businesses".

In BrE preventative is quite standard, although less common than preventive. (Site search at the Times = 128 preventive:102 preventative, 418:211 at the Economist). Both apparently came into English at much the same time.

I'm afraid I'm a preventative and orientated (also OK in BrE) sort of bloke. But I don't think it's because I like longer words or am trying to sound clever; these are simply the words I've always been used to, and I also prefer the way they sound.

As for pre-plan, if we can say something like "we need to plan ahead on this one" I don't really see a problem with pre-plan ("plan in advance"- Oxford Dictionaries). Pro-active gets similar criticism, but similarly I see a difference between pro-active and active. The point being in the former you act before events happen, rather than simply reacting to them.

And how do you feel about 'burglarize' (AmE), which seems to be much more common in the States than the considerably shorter 'burgle', and is a back formation from 'burglar'? Isn't it just really a matter of what you're used to?

Incidentally, there are several forum discussions about "based out of" around the web.

I think this is a bit similar to a question jayles put a few weeks ago about time clauses. For me, A1 doesn't work. I'm not sure if I can explain why, but let's have a go anyway. Here's a stripped down version without the relative clause:

The narrator arrived at the house of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who had sent him a letter.

All fine and dandy - Roderick Usher sent a letter and then the narrator arrived at his house - because the earlier action is placed second it goes into Past perfect

What did the letter do? - it requested his presence, NOT it had requested his presence.
So what had he sent? A letter that requested his presence.

It would have been different if there had been two anterior actions:

"The narrator arrived at the house of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who had sent him a letter and had asked him to visit"

But here we only have one action, and the relative clause is simply modifying the noun "letter". Other similar examples of relative clauses and that clauses with Past perfect:

"The previous year he had given me a watch that told the time in ten countries."
"By the time she left, I had grown tired of her always saying that she was too tired to go out."

But sometimes we do need a Past Perfect in the relative clause, when it concerns an earlier action:

"She told him that she had already read the book that he had given her."
BUT
"She told him that she had already read the book that he was talking about"
"She told him that she had read a book that described their situation exactly"

The second two are more to do with the book itself, the first is about his action in giving it to her.

@jayles - I stand corrected. The Channel 5 one is disappointing, admittedly, but look carefully at your second example - It really means "the five things about Linux you aren't allowed to discuss", he isn't "discussing about Linux". So I'd say the second one was OK.

This one from the Washington Post is similar - "White men have much to discuss about mass shootings" - the "about the mass shootings" goes with "much" not "discuss". There are a few examples of 'discuss about something', but a lot of them turn out to be of this type.

A quick look suggests though that this might be standard in Indian English. Out of the ten examples on the first page at Google Books for "discuss about", one is of the sort I've been talking about, one is uncheckable, one is about the grammatical error, six are published in India:

"Discuss about the advantages and disadvantages of management by objectives" - Principles Of Management, by V.S.Bagad

"Discuss about various devices for the transportation of solids" - Mechanical Operations Fundamental Principles and Applications, by Kiran D. Patil

"Discuss about steps in root canal treatment" - Essentials of Operative Dentistry, by I. Anand Sherwood

"Discuss about the factors determining an effective span of management." - Principles of Management (a different one), by K. Anbuvelan

"Discuss about the forest resources and their uses." - Elements of Environmental Science and Engineering, by P. Meenakshi

"Briefly discuss about the Gandhi Peace Peace Prize" - How To Do Well In Gds And Interviews, by T.I.M.E (India)

Admittedly one was published in the USA, but the author is a certain Firdos Alam Khan.

http://www.google.com/search?q=itbusinessedge.com%2Fcm%2Fblogs%2Fenderle%2Fthe-five-things-you-arent-allowed-to-discuss-about-linux%2F%3Fcs%3D16507&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=%22discuss+about%22&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=bks