@jayles - but it is precisely because I'm a non-believer that I have neither the need nor the desire to replace continuous with anything. Sorry, but to be honest I think the whole idea is absolutely daft. I'm perfectly happy with both ongoing and continuous, they are both thoroughly standard English words. My only concern is with what sounds natural (ie used by most people) and apt for the occasion. And I have to say that the use of words like "othersome" simply sound twee to me. (Which is not surprising as I can only find two dictionaries that list it, and that as poetic and dialectal, and with a completely different meaning to the one you're using - "some folks do and othersome don't").

And again continuous and ongoing are not often synonymous in my book. Road works can be ongoing, but the stream of traffic passing them is continuous. Police investigations can be ongoing, but the policeman conducting them is in continuous employment, but pissed off because the rain has been continuous all day. It's a matter of simple collocation, and the fact that ongoing is used about processes, rather than states. I (and I imagine the vast majority of English speakers) use words to express myself, not for what are patently ideological reasons.

@Brus and Eoin - I think you're both partly correct as regards French punctuation - I make no comment as to its standard punctuation in American English. An e acute is normally pronounced quite short in French (e as in bed) rather than ay (as in ray) - and French dictionaries give the pronunciation /ʀezyme/ (rezoome) rather than /ʀeɪzymeɪ/ (rayzoomay). However it is true that the second e does get elongated a bit and ends up nearer /eɪ/.(ay). Of course if you're really going to do it à la française, you need to do something about the R as well (but that might come over as a bit pretentious). You can hear it pronounced here:

http://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/summary

@Samir Hafza - You can certainly have the link (I'm always happy to blow my own trumpet). I hope you enjoy it, although it's not very conclusive :

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/03/can-succession-of-take-plural-verb.html

The trouble about these equivalents is that many (perhaps most) of us use both the Latin-derived and Anglo-Saxon derived words, but with subtly different meanings and collocations. A showy car, showy clothes yes, but a showy word? Oxford Online has showy as "having a striking appearance or style, typically by being excessively bright, colourful, or ostentatious" - "showy costume jewellery" and pretentious as "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed" - "a pretentious film". Use an online collocation finder and "showy word" appears nowhere, nor does it make much inroads in Google Books.

Similarly, I use both "wherewithal" and "ability", but for most of us I imagine (and in dictionaries) wherewithal is more about physical resources, especially money. When talking about skill, ability is more natural.

I might well say something underpins somebody's argument, but I'm not going to underpin that person at the next election, I'm going to support them.

For me, to see these as simple equivalents is to grossly simplify the meanings they have acquired over the centuries. Unlike AnWulf I have no insight into how these words came into English, and if they have become the natural choice over time, I don't really care. I live in this millennium, not the last.

Take the word "dictionary", a word all you Anglish fans studiously avoid and probably think of as being somehow "foreign". It has in fact been in use in English since about 1520, rather longer than "wordbook"(1590s), and also rather longer than Europeans have permanently been in North America. It is as English as Americans are American!

Now look at usage: there is a 900-1 ratio dictionary to wordbook on the Internet, and something similar in Google Books. And if you discounted the other meaning of wordbook (libretto) it would no doubt be a lot higher. Dictionary is the word that is overwhelmingly used by English speakers. The every day words that the vast majority of us use totally naturally are apparently not good enough for you, simply because of their derivation. So yes, I do think the use of wordbook and wordstock (for vocabulary) is being pretentious. And no, I don't think it is being showy; that's something else.

But then I'm not one of the true believers.

@Samir Hafza - On forums like this it is absolutely fair game to disagree with language points other commenters make, and what I was quick to do was to question the grammar point Levant had made, which I thought was questionable.

But personally I don't think it is very good manners to criticise the actual language other people use unless it has a bearing on the point in question, or the other person has asked for our opinion on something. What Levant said about punctuation was a good point, and I pretty well agree with it, but I felt his picking on Jolie's grammar was rather gratuitous, having nothing to do with the subject under discussion, so yes, I did have a mild go at this in my closing remark.

The fact that Levant is not a native speaker is really neither here nor there: it wasn't his language I was (very mildly) questioning, rather the action, so no, I don't think I was being hypocritical. As you can see in these pages, most of the people who take it on themselves to "correct" others are in fact native speakers, and I would have said exactly the same to one of them. I'm surrounded by non-native speakers all day, every day (I'm an EFL teacher), so I assure you I'm not going to pick on people just because they're not native speakers.

In fact, in my experience, most of the people who make comments like this about strict agreement are American native speakers. For example, in your last sentence you use "singular they". For me as an EFL teacher and BrE speaker this is absolutely standard, and I use it myself. And good usage guides will tell you the same. The people who are most likely to think this is an error are in fact native-speaker Americans.

On the other hand, I do think a non-native speaker who hasn't lived for some time in an English-speaking country does need to think (or better still check) very carefully before correcting a native, as there are all sorts of exceptions and nuances that a native speaker will know instinctively that a foreigner may not. And the same applies to me and, for example American English (and vice-versa). I've seen a quite a lot of critical comments made on these pages of language which was perfectly standard within the part of the English community that the original commenter belonged to.

So I will just restate my opinion, that unless asked, it is simply good manners (and often wiser) not to jump in and criticise somebody else's language when it is irrelevant to the question. But once someone crosses that line, then as far as I'm concerned they are fair game.

I will thank Levant, however, as his comment got me thinking about the particular grammar point he brought up, which lead to me writing a post about it on my blog.

@AnWulf - My mother tongue is modern English, not Anglo-Saxon. I revel in the fact that it has its main roots in two language groups, Old English and French, (including Norman and Anglo-french), as well as accepting loan words from many other cultures. Our grammar is mainly Germanic, much of our vocabulary comes from French or, OK, from Latin. I have no problem with that; indeed I'm deeply suspicious of any sort of cultural purism, and I'm afraid your outburst about William the Conqueror on another thread simply confirmed all my worst suspicions about this whole pure English movement.

It's just as well musicians don't take a similar attitude, or we'd have no classical music (a mixture of Italian, German and French traditions), no Blues, Jazz or Soul (European and African traditions) and so ultimately no Rock (mixing various Black and White traditions), and no Salsa, Samba, Tango etc, (mixing Black, White, Urban, Rural, European and African traditions).

The truth is that the most exciting cultural advances come in cosmopolitan climates where different cultures meet, not in purist backwaters.It is precisely this variety of roots that makes English so fascinating for me, and gives such a wide choice of vocabulary to writers. The English language, proud mongrel that it is, has after all given us probably the greatest literary tradition in the world.

@HS - they seem pretty evenly matched in Google search, Ngram and Newspaper websites etc. Having thought about it a bit, I think you can almost always substitute "fair" for "true", but not the other way round. In my examples, you could say that what she said was fair but not that the judge's sentence was true.

I had thought of pointing out to Georgy Porgy that Old English was likely spoken in Edinburgh (although perhaps not exclusively) long before the Kingdom of England was established, as Edinburgh (itself an English name - Edwin's burgh) was for some three hundred years part of the Kingdom of Northumbria, from 638 to 950, when it fell to the (Gaelic-speaking) Scots.

@AnWulf - I hate to disappoint you, but we Scots had a third injection of French, mainly due to the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France, which lasted for some four hundred years, culminating in the regency of Mary of Guise in the sixteenth century. The most colourful example of this is probably the expression "Dinnae fash yersel" from the French se facher - to get annoyed.

But if plead is not truly English because it didn't come from Old English, doesn't that mean that nearly three-quarters of English words "are not truly English" by your reckoning? I think in Scotland we rather like the fact that our language has had so many influences. The Scottish ideal of "the man o' pairts" nicely combines two of those root languages.

The judge's sentence was harsh but fair, given the ferocity of the crime.
What she said about how drink was destroying his life was harsh but undoubtedly true.

In the article I mentioned above, Professor Pullum finishes by saying "And I don’t mean just that fine writing with adverbs is possible; I mean that all fine writing in English has adverbs (just open any work of literature you respect and start reading)."

This is very easy (for out of copyright books, at any rate) with Project Gutenberg, just open any book and search for "ly ". These are from the early paragraphs of a few classics. All of them, I suggest, would be poorer without their adverbs, some meaningless:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
Charles Dickens - Hard Times

Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre

All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.
Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety
Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest
James Joyce - Ulysses

and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven,
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady

Incidentally, verbs like "plod" and "trudge" have very specific meanings. I see nothing wrong with using "slowly" in a sentence like "She slowly made her way across the room" when I don't want her to "amble, meander, wander, saunter" etc, I just want her to walk slowly.