Fair enough, mate. (Actually, I never say mate; it's not in my ideolect, as the linguists would say), but quite a few of my colleagues do.

In 'Alcoholics Anonymous' it's still an adjective - meaning 'Anonymous alcoholics' - so that's a bit of a red herring. But I have to wonder when you would ever need a plural and if you did it would be likely to revert to being an adjective - The anonymous few / two - etc.

The problem with anonymities is it sounds to more like people nobody has ever heard of, rather than people who want to keep their anonymity:

"He stood behind a steel network of banks and lawyers and anonymities, unreachable", Edgar Wallace.

"Amid the puny anonymities who inhabited what we have come to call the White House between Jackson and Lincoln" - David P.Currie

But there is a class of adjective we use for plural groups, and with a stretch of the imagination, anonymous might possible be used in a similar way -

"While the rich and famous lived on the hill, this side of town is mainly occupied by the poor and the unskilled, the homeless, the faceless and the anonymous."

In Britain we used to have a stereotype writer of angry letters to newspapers who was often referred to as ''Disgusted, of Tunbridge Wells" (perhaps there's an American equivalent). If he and his wife had signed jointly, would they have been "The Disgusteds"? I don't think the question has ever arisen.

@Jasper - there's no reason why different word classes can't affect (or have an effect on) each other, just think how 'prioritise' has replaced 'give priority to', and 'incentivise' is replacing 'give incentives to' in business English. Both verb forms are now standard in business English course books, where the verb + noun + preposition combinations would have been used twenty years ago.

Other (also controversial) examples would include nouns being used as verbs replacing verb + noun + preposition combinations - 'action' instead of 'take action on', 'access' rather than 'gain access to', 'influence' instead of 'have an influence on' etc.

The reasons for the rise of motivate and motivation are not hard to see. While motive has been English since the 14th century, both motivate and motivation are relatively recent arrivals (1863 and 1873 respectively - Etymology Online). What's more, they became heavily used in two very twentieth century phenomena - the rise of psychology, and of business theory. I can't open a business course book without stumbling across staff motivation.

I doubt this has so much to do with sounding more Latin, jayles (they're all ultimately from Latin). The provenance is likely to have been French or German via psychology - much early work on psychology was in German-speaking countries. And the meaning was a new one, so a new word would have been appropriate.

But I think you're on to something with motivation and possibly even motivate partly replacing motive. Oxford Online gives these definitions:

motive - a reason for doing something
motivation - a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

This looks to me to give some considerable room for overlap, so it wouldn't be surprising if motivation was replacing motive in some senses, especially to talk more generally, where earlier there had been no alternative to motive. It seems no accident that the beginning of the real decline in use of 'motive' (around 1900) coincides pretty neatly with the beginnings of the use of motivation.

Incidentally, since 2000, according to Ngram, motivate and motivation have retreated somewhat, while motive has had a bit of a comeback. Unfortunately PITE won't let me do an a href and it has problems with hhtps addresses, so just google Ngram, enter 'motive,motivation,motivate,motivating,motivated' and adjust the final year to 2008.
There's also a bit of a difference between American books and British books - in British books, motivation is quite well ahead of motive, while in American books they're running neck and neck.

@jayles - I think you ought to come clean. You might be teaching BrE, but are you in fact American (spelling clue)?

@jayles - another way is to google, for example "words ending ment". The first entry will probably be MoreWords, which gives words for Scrabble etc. It will give you a list of the most common, with their ratings. This is what they say about it:

"The words are from the Enable2k North American word list used in well-known word games. This contains 173,528 words which are mostly US spellings, with some words from other forms of English (such as British)."

That's what I used when dividing abstract nouns into more and less common lists:

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2012/10/forming-abstract-nouns-using-suffixes.html

To return to topic, my motivation behind that rather long comment is a general interest in English and in looking things up; my motive was to try and answer jayles's question.

@jayles - I'm still not sure whether you're talking with your teacher's hat on, or talking about English in general. If we're talking in general, I'm all for hearing more dialect and other Englishes in broadcasting, for example.

According to some research, only about 15% (or less) of British children arriving at primary schools have Standard English as their mother tongue, (but nearly all understand it of course, because it is the language of broadcasting, books etc) . Unless you're going to change society, however, schools need to teach them Standard English if they're going to get on in life. But there is no reason this can't be done in a comparative way with their regional dialect, rather than teaching Standard English as somehow superior. Indeed some research seems to show that this helps non-standard speakers learn to use Standard English more effectively.

When it comes to teaching foreign learners, we need to teach them some sort of standard, whether its American English or British English, simply so that they can use it as widely as possible. When we learn French or Spanish, we take it for granted that we learn a standard version of the language (whether a European version, or an American version).

There is much debate about whether a World English will eventually replace BrE and AmE for international communication, but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm afraid Indian English doesn't really have much currency beyond the sub-continent.

But British English is changing rapidly, as does our concept of 'proper English'. You just need to listen to old radio programmes from the 50's and 60s on the iPlayer to hear the difference. A few years ago a City report suggested that companies prefer to employ people with Estuary accents rather than RP ones, as they sounded friendlier, and RP has really lost the position it had up until the 60s. Just listen to Radio Four announcers and continuity people - all speaking Standard English of course, but hardly a pure RP speaker amongst them, so with quite a bit of pronunciation variation, especially in vowel sounds. I'm thinking, for example, of Susan Rae (Scottish) and Kathy Clugston (Northern Ireland), and I'm pretty sure we hear quite a lot of northern Us these days. Most of the time I listen to Radio 4 Extra on the Internet, where it is even more eclectic, as several comedians like Arthur Smith (non-RP London) do continuity as well.

As for less common expressions, isn't the Academic Word List divided into sublists according to their frequency? Macmillan Dictionary gives star ratings according to frequency, and Wordcount.org will give you a frequency score (up to about 87,000 I think). Just the Word (based on the British National Corpus - BNC) and the web-based Netspeak will also give you frequency figures. Or you can use the BNC simple search facility to get frequency:

For example, if I take the word 'analysis' from sublist 1 in the AWL, Macmillan gives it three stars for high frequency and Wordcount.org puts it at as the 740th most common word. Netspeak finds 125.0 million examples, while the BNC has 13151.

If I take 'enforcement' from sublist 5 in the AWL, Macmillan gives it two stars and Wordcount puts it at 5782. At Netspeak, 23.6 million, at the BNC 1341.

And when I take 'adjacent' from sublist 10 in the AWL, Macmillan gives it one star (so still within the top 7500), and Wordcount lists it at 6702. Netspeak gives it 9.9 million, BNC 1623

Intriguingly, 'conceive', from sublist 10, (1.3 million at Netspeak - BNC 450), gets two stars at Macmillan but comes in at 120001 at Wordcount, while 'inconceivable' (406,000 at Netspeak - BNC 255) gets no stars and is ranked at 17023 at Wordcount.

So there are certainly ways of getting comparative figures.

@jayles - I'm a little confused. Who relies on what handful of Brits? I think we should be told! And what is this "proper" grammar and pronunciation you seem to despise?

@Rahul kumar Gupta - Hi. I have a question, and this is purely an observation. In British and American English, we don't usually use 'according to' in the first person, only in third person. But as well as your own use, I've just noticed at a Yahoo Answers thread on 'according to me', a certain sai krishna saying it was absolutely normal.

This got me to wondering whether it is in fact standard in Indian English, and a quick site search of the main Indian English-language newspapers certainly seems to suggest that that's the case:

"According to me, badminton is the No.1 sport of the country" - Saina Nehwal, top Badminton player, quoted in The Times of India

"According to me Kareena has surpassed Julia Roberts from the original," - film director Siddharth Malhotra, quoted in the Hindustan Times

"According to me, the present collegium system works well." - Justice P. Sathasivam, currently Chief Justice of India - interviewed in the Hindu

So could you perhaps tell us whether it's often used like this, and if it's used more informally, formally or both?

I've just discovered that "according to me" seems pretty well standard in Indian English, as a site search of Indian newspapers shows. Here are some examples:

"According to me, badminton is the No.1 sport of the country" - Saina Nehwal, top Badminton player, quoted in The Times of India

"According to me Kareena has surpassed Julia Roberts from the original," - film director Siddharth Malhotra, quoted in the Hindustan Times

"According to me, the present collegium system works well." - Justice P. Sathasivam, currently Chief Justice of India - interviewed in the Hindu

Try googling any of the following:

"according to me" site:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
"according to me" site:http://www.hindustantimes.com/
"according to me" site:http://www.thehindu.com/

@Virginia - I don't know about passive-aggressive, but I was certainly intending to be mildly ironic. I wouldn't have mentioned it all had I not found your own Monty Python quip somewhat 'dismissive' of everyone else's comments. Or was I reading too much into it, perhaps? If so, I apologise.