Yes, both your examples were definitely correct. And I'm sure that if it sounds grammatically correct to you as an educated native speaker, it is because it is grammatically correct (or rather vice-versa - grammatical "correctness" can be judged by what sounds appropriate to an educated native speaker).

Where I have a problem is with a sentence like -"So this means that when he leaves there will be a vacancy" - I'm pretty sure you can leave "that" out here, but it sounds better left in to me. On the other hand - "So this means there will be a vacancy when he leaves" (without "that") sounds fine to me.

I think it must be something to do with putting an adverbial phrase ("when he leaves") between "that" and the subject ("there"), but I haven't come across anything about it to say (that) "that" is compulsory here. Perhaps somebody else can shed some light on that one.

"That" has several uses, but in two of them, it is possible to omit it:

1. When it is a conjunction introducing a "that" clause which is not the subject, as in your example. But when a "that" clause is used as the subject (quite rare), "that" cannot be omitted - "That she left him wasn't very surprising". But we usually prefer to use a construction with the "dummy" subject "it" - "It's not surprising (that) she left him." But sometimes the sentence flows better with "that" left in.

2. When it is a relative pronoun in a restrictive (defining) relative clause which does not refer to the subject. - "This is the hotel (that) I was talking about."

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/that.html
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/that-is-not-always-necessary/

@Wackygrass - Most people in Britain are brought up speaking a non-standard regional dialect, and have been for centuries. It has been estimated that as many as 85% of children arrive at school with their dialect as their mother tongue. Historically, many of these have had problems speaking and writing standard English, although they all understand it of course. Traditionally, many teachers have discouraged dialect, others talk to the kids in it. (As in the film "Kes")

Nobody doubts the need for kids to be able to use standard English competently, but there is a growing body of research in both North America and Britain which appears to show that children brought up speaking a non-standard dialect learn standard English better when it is studied in a comparative way with their own dialect, rather than being forced on them as a replacement for their own dialect, thus denigrating the way their own parents speak.

There was a bit of debate about this in the UK recently when a Teedside school tried to get the parents to stop their children using dialect in school.

http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2013/02/06/debate-over-teesside-dialect-and-accent-continues-84229-32755473/2/

@Corinna - you're definitely on the right track: it means to just beat somebody, to beat them by a narrow margin. It's often used in the idiom "to pip somebody at the post", the post being the winning post, presumably from horse-racing, where many of our idioms come from.

We also sometimes use the noun pips for the small seeds in certain fruit such as apples and orange, which I think is not so common over there.

@Corinna - we also use lawn and flower beds (some people think that no British garden is complete without its lawn), but I always used to wonder about the title of Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns until I realised that you use sprinklers a lot over there.

A couple more from your own comment - plow (AmE), plough (BrE) - dirt (AmE), earth (BrE)

There's an excellent blog about these differences run by an American linguist living and working in Britain - http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

@Corinna - I was trying to be careful not to suggest that you personally had a feeling of superiority, but I can assure you that's the impression I get when I look at sites like Apostrophe Abuse, or perhaps self-satisfied smugness would be a better description.

Yes, you're right, what you're talking about is not the Greengrocer's apostrophe, but I don't think the sin is any less venial. (I can't remember seeing any signs like this on this side of the pond). I just think that there is so much more about English that is truly fascinating than worrying about somebody else's "errors", which in the case of apostrophes are incredibly minor and make absolutely no difference to anything.

Incidentally, one strange AmE / BrE difference - what you call a yard, we call a garden. A yard for us usually has a hard surface like concrete or stones etc, like a builder's yard or a farmyard, for example. I discovered this when I wanted a picture of a back yard (in the BrE sense) for a song exercise for my students, and all I could find on Google Images were beautiful back gardens - not what I wanted at all. :)

Correction - Like the use of "less" instead of "fewer"

@Corinna - It all depends on how people understand "correct language". English existed for at least 1000 years before the first grammar book was published. But it always had grammar, it always had rules. Rules don't come out of a grammar book or usage guide, but from the use of the language, and they change.

All that grammar books and usage guides do is codify this, and good ones will take these changes into account. Of course we all prefer what we're used to, and few people like change in language (except perhaps for young people). Personally, I regret the passing of any sense of awe in the modern use of the word awesome, for example, but I just have to get over it; the meaning I grew up with is very much the minority meaning nowadays.

As far as punctuation is concerned, I think this got codified quite late on, and the rules seem stricter in the States. I prefer comma=short pause, semicolon=longer pause rather than a list of strict rules, for example.

The apostrophe was the last punctuation mark to arrive in English, and perhaps its use took a long time to get really settled. The so-called Greengrocer's apostrophe (as in your examples) was in fact one of the earliest uses of the apostrophe, especially with words of foreign origin where people didn't know if the final S was a plural or part of the singular noun. Like the use of "less" instead of "few", this "wrong" use of the apostrophe never causes any ambiguity (unlike a wrongly placed comma, which is said to have started a war!), and the only possible reason for criticising it is so that we can feel superior: that "we" know the "rules", and "they" don't.

Go down to any London street market, and you'll see hundreds of Greengrocer's apostrophes. But listen to the people who wrote them: you won't hear many people use English as creatively they do. So no, I might smile when I see them, but I don't want to scream. But I can't say the same for those "apostrophe abuse" hunters (and critics of "Ten items or less") that take such glee in finding other peoples "errors", while evidently thinking themselves "Oh so superior". Like the folks at the website Apostrophe Abuse, for example. :)

Is this a contest to see who's the oldest? HS, you seem to be just pipping me, although I am over retirement age. As the original questioner, I have now realised that if the "thing" version is all you have heard, yes, it will make perfect sense to you (although lacking, for me personally, the preciseness of the original).

Skeeter, I think you're probably right as to how it started, and I will continue to use "think", but perhaps we oldies should now accept the "thing" version with good grace. :)

Oxford Advanced Learner's, Macmillan's and Longman's dictionaries (all BrE) all give examples of "decision" with "take", Longman's specifying that take a decision "=make an important decision, especially after considering carefully".

At Just the Word, which finds collocations based on the British National Corpus, there are 3019 instances of "make" compared to 1131 for "take", so I agree "make" is much more common, but "take" also has quite a presence. If you look at these examples from the BNC, you'll see they're mainly about politics, business etc (weighty matters!):

http://www.just-the-word.com/show_examples.pl?triple=decision_N+obj_of+take_V

on the other hand you probably wouldn't "take" a snap decicision; all the examples of "snap decision" in the BNC appear to be with "make".

Try a site search at a British newspaper by Googling:
"took the decision" site:www.guardian.co.uk
or other papers and you''ll find plenty of examples (although more in some than others):

The Guardian 18,200
The Independent 3,280
The Times 383
Daily Telegraph 5,590
The Economist 213
Daily Mail 1,110
The Sun 484 (not so many weighty topics?)
The Mirror 585
Daily Express 7,240

As for "take a choice", that's a different story. It certainly doesn't show up in Just the Word, but there are some examples around if you Google, for example, "a difficult choice to take". (but a lot of it is just "noise")