Hi Brus, I wasn't feeling particularly grumpy; I was trying to find a compromise. Here's you and b.r.whitney both insisting on your particular version being the only correct one, whereas you are both right, as any American dictionary would have told you.

And there are some people on this forum who never seem to look up a dictionary, even though it's only a click away. Just look at the threads on the past forms of "text" and "plead", and on "cannot" and "can not" if you don't believe me. Much of the discussion takes place as though dictionaries didn't even exist.

I can assure you that British dictionaries are just as descriptive as American ones; that is the job of a dictionary. In fact the (in)famous 3rd edition of Websters New International Dictionary was rather better received in the UK than in the US.

I accept that résumé is only given one spelling in British dictionaries, but as you say, it has a different meaning in British English, and we don't use it that much anyway. And as you well know, British spelling often differs from American spelling in any case. I wouldn't go by an American dictionary for a British usage, so it seems reasonable to stick with American dictionaries for an American usage.

Most foreign loan words that are used a lot in English sooner or later adopt a native English spelling. After all, something like a quarter of all the words in English come from French one way and another, but we don't use accents on most of them. And résumé has been around in English since 1804, so it should have been well-enough absorbed by now. As it is used a lot in American English, it wouldn't be really surprising if it also underwent some form of Anglicisation there.

What you call half-baked and lazy (and you call me grumpy!) is in fact very logical. The first accent isn't needed in English, but it helps to have the final e accented to make sure we sound it.

I think you're being a little over-optimistic if you think the average Brit has much of a finer grasp of the niceties of grave, acute and circumflex accents than the average American. I certainly didn't till I studied French at university level.

You may not like particular spellings, and that is your right and you don't have to use them. And I understand your affinity for French; it's a language I love as well. But we're talking about English,and as these alternative spellings for a specifically American usage appear in just about every American dictionary, I don't see how you can really insist that the original French spelling is the only correct one.

Personally, I trust the scholarship that goes into producing these dictionaries rather more than the personal opinions of individuals expressed in forums like this: yours, mine or anyone else's. That may sound grumpy to you, but if we cannot even accept dictionaries as representing some sort of standard, especially when they all agree (the American ones that is - for an American usage), then it seems to me we don't have much grounds for a discussion. :)

@Abootty - I don't know where you got that one from, as 'cannot' is the most common on both sides of the Atlantic:

OED (UK) - "cannot is the ordinary modern way of writing can not"
AskOxford (UK) - "Both cannot and can not are acceptable spellings, but the first is much more usual."

Common Errors, at Washington State University (US) - "These two spellings are largely interchangeable, but by far the more common is “cannot” and you should probably use it except when you want to be emphatic"
Merriam-Webster (US) - "cannot"
GrammarGirl (US) - 'Both "cannot" and "can not" are acceptable, although it's more common to see the one-word spelling--"cannot." '

Google Books - "cannot" - 297 million, "can not" - 33 million

I wonder why some of you seem to think you know better than the standard dictionaries. (In fact I wonder if some of you even bother checking a dictionary before declaring that such-and-such is the only correct answer). Most American dictionaries seem to accept all three:

Merriam -Webster - ré·su·mé or re·su·me, also re·su·mé
American Heritage Dictionary (at the Free Dictionary) -
re·su·mé or re·su·me or ré·su·mé
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary (at the Free Dictionary) - ré•su•mé or re•su•me or re•su•mé
Dictionary.com (based on Random House) - ré·su·mé, also resume, re·su·mé

Merriam-Webster leads with résumé and American Heritage leads with resumé, but both of them allow both the other variants, so it's really a matter of take your pick - all of three have arguments in their favour:

résumé - keeps the original French accents, but English doesn't always do this when it adopts French words, eg melee, negligee (accent optional)
resumé - more Anglicised, but keeps the last acute to show that the e is pronounced
resume - fully Anglicised, but could lead to pronunciation misunderstandings

Keeping the second accute accent seems a good idea to show that the final e is pronounced (which it wouldn't normally be in English), and this is what usually happens with French words ending in a sounded e, such as blasé, cliché etc. But keeping the first one is not really necessary for pronunciation in English (how many English speakers know the difference between e, é and è in French?), and is optional in words like 'debut', for example.

So pick the one you like best, but I don't think you have much grounds for saying other people are wrong if they choose one of the others.

Luckily it's not my problem; where I come from it's a CV (as it is in France, incidentally; the French don't use résumé in this meaning)

It's certainly true that the majority of one syllable -ead / -eed verbs with that particular sound take an -ed form in the past - lead, read (in sound), bleed, breed, feed etc.

But there quite a few which don't - heed, knead, need, seed, weed - so I don't think you can build an all-embracing rule on it. In any case, the truth is that over a long period of time English speakers in their wisdom have largely plumped for 'pleaded' except for the exceptions given above - so apart from in some law reports perhaps, pleaded it is.

"He pleaded for his life"
- Google Search 533,000, Google Books 14,600, New York Times 116

"He pled for his life"
- Google Search 16,200, Google Books 91, New York Times 0

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pleaded%2Cpled&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Yes, "as regards something/somebody" and "in/with/regard to something/somebody" are both formal, but sometimes in business letters or reports they're difficult to avoid. Sometimes in informal spoken language I just say (yes, say) 're:' - 'Re: tomorrow's party, has anyone bought the booze yet?'

I'm slightly puzzled by Jeremy's comment - "With regards to is Nonstandard and frequently functions as a shibboleth" - How can something *function as* a shibboleth, I wonder. Surely it's either a shibboleth or it isn't?

I agree that adverbs normally go after "be" when there is no auxiliary, and we wouldn't usually say "There only is one choice" (although we might if we were stressing "is"). But here we have a modal "can", which changes the situation. For example, in answer to the question "Where have you been in France?" we'd normally say "I've only been to Paris", not "I've been only to Paris".

And in Hairy Scot's original example I still maintain that the more natural position for "only" is between "can" and "be" is. And I don't appear to be alone:

Google search is totally skewed by the "Highlander" quote, but on Google Books (edited and proofread) we have:
"there can only be one" - 709,000
"there can be only one" - 155,000

And they mostly seem to be used with exactly the same meaning (mostly to do with religion).

"there can only be one ultimate cause of rational change in general"
"there can only be one church"
"there can only be one thing"

"there can be only one Church"
"there can be only one human reason"
"there can be only one religion"

And you were right the first time, "only" is still an adverb in "can be only one", as in "Only five people turned up" (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary - only: adverb). "She is the only one for me" - there it's an adjective.

There seems to be a strange discrepancy on Ngram, which graphs a selection of Google Books (about 5% I think). On the Ngram graph, the instances of "there can be only one" are about double those of "there can only be one" (although the difference is less in British English). But if you click on the two phrases, at the bottom, you get the same results for Google Books as I got above, which give a very different picture. Very strange.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=there+can+only+be+one%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cthere+can+only+be+one%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Cthere+can+be+only+one%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cthere+can+be+only+one%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

@nadibes - The problem for me is that your example "I was going to X, but if you don't want me to I can not" doesn't sound particularly natural to me. Wouldn't we be more likely to say "but if you don't want me to, I can *not* go", or even more likely "I don't *have* to go"?

In fact there is not one single hit on Google (or in Google Books) for "if you don't want me to I can not", whereas there are nearly five million for "if you don't want me to I don't have to". Even "You can not go if you don't want to", which sounds slightly better to me, really only gets one hit.

If we did use "can not" in this sense, it is because we are stressing the "not", and "cannot" would admittedly not be possible here, and there would indeed be a difference in meaning. But I think that sort of sentence is pretty rare.

As you rightly say, this stress also happens with "can you not", which can sometimes be a stronger version of "can't you".

"Can you *not* shut up while I'm trying to listen to the news?"
"Can't you shut up while I'm trying to listen to the news?"

But in other cases, "can't" wouldn't be possible.

"Can you *not* forget to buy milk this time?"

I've just noticed dbfreak's example - "Can you not shake your leg when I’m in the room?", where he says that it means - You can just not shake, ok? -> You can not shake it. As in, you can choose to not shake it rather than you being unable, incapable of shaking!

But that's not what it means to me at all! To me it means "Please don't shake your leg when I’m in the room!" just as "Can you not forget to buy milk this time?" means "Please don't forget".

A search at the British National Corpus for "can not" brings up a random fifty examples - 48 of which are for "cannot", and where "cannot" or "can't" could be substituted in both examples "can not".

http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=can+not&mysubmit=Go

Check "can not" at Google Books, and on the first few pages at least, all the examples could be replaced by "cannot" or "can't".

In almost all standard contexts, there is no difference.

There's a slight but well-known conflict with 'only', as purist grammarians say that any adverb, including 'only', should go next to the word it modifies, whereas most linguists and usage guides seem to agree that the most natural position for 'only' is between the auxiliary and the main verb, as in 'can only be' . And they also recognise that in a sentence like 'He only died last week' the vast majority of us immediately realise that 'only' refers to last week. But the pedants insist that this means that all he did last week was die. He didn't cook a meal, have sex or go for a walk; he just died.

Here's Grammar Girl with the more purist (pedantic?) argument :

These two sentences mean different things:
I ate only vegetables.
I only ate vegetables.

The first sentence (I ate only vegetables) means that I ate nothing but vegetables—no fruit, no meat, just vegetables. The second sentence (I only ate vegetables) means that all I did with vegetables was eat them. I didn't plant, harvest, wash, or cook them. I only ate them.

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/misplaced-modifiers?page=all#sthash.KaCrusdE.dpuf

The humourist James Thurber didn't have much time for that sort of argument; he wrote: "The purist will say that the expression: "He only died last week" is incorrect, and that it should be: "He died only last week." The purist's contention is that the first sentence, if carried out to a natural conclusion, would give us something like this: "He only died last week, he didn't do anything else, that's all he did." It isn't a natural conclusion, however, because nobody would say that and if anybody did it would be likely to lead to stomping of feet and clapping of hands, because it is one of those singy-songy expressions which set a certain type of person to acting rowdy and becoming unmanageable."

http://grammar.about.com/b/2012/07/09/thurber-on-only.htm

I imagine that something similar is at play here, so here's my stab at it. To most of us they are exactly the same, but a pedant might argue that in 'there can only be one', as 'only' theoretically modifies 'be', not 'one' - it means that the only possibility is one (no more, but also no less, i.e. not zero)

But in the case of 'there can be only one', 'only' modifies 'one', so limits it to one, but doesn't rule out zero. Or perhaps it's the other way around!

@Felix - in this context, I'd say none.

Porsche is of course right that intonation doesn't necessarily go up at the end of questions, isn't he? - I'm not really asking a question with that tag - 'isn't he?', and the intonation would usually go down. But tag questions are still questions, and still need a question mark, even if we don't expect an answer, don't they?

And so does 'Who knows?', which is certainly a question, albeit a rhetorical one. 'Who' only has two grammatical functions - relative pronoun and interrogative pronoun, and here it's the latter, so a it needs that question mark, unless you want to break all the conventions of normal writing. Otherwise, as someone else has pointed out, someone called 'who' apparently knows.

Yes, a lot of the time question marks aren't strictly necessary for understanding, but then neither are exclamation marks, commas, semi-colons and colons (or brackets for that matter!). If you're going to throw out question marks, why not just throw out the whole caboodle?