@George 7th - Your Majesty would appear to be as wilfully ignorant or disdainful of both Scotland and North America as your ancestors. From Oxford Dictionaries Online:

plead - verb (past and past participle pleaded or North American, Scottish, or dialect pled /plɛd/)

but I'm sure you could use your royal prerogative to get it changed. Examples from Scottish Newspapers in one of my previous comments.

@Frogwhisperer - were there two men? As a conjunction, "yet" means "despite this", and is often used after "and" - so we could have "The man (eg. Tom) walked over the bridge, and yet he (eg. Dick) ran."

By searching a bit more systematically I've found a lot more examples, although even in New Zealand, "deal with" is vastly more common, see:

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-i-dealt-to-checking-new-zealand.html

And there's an even stranger variation - some people have added "to" to the noun, to make sentences like (references in my blog piece):

Aldridge says going past Dickeson's mark means a great to deal to him

That sort of thing can mean a great to deal to gamers

which leave a great to deal to be desired

@nigel - but at least the example sentences in my links made sense, included two from the same (NZ) newspaper and hadn't been given red traffic lights by WOT (Web of Trust). I'd be very careful before clicking on some of your links!

Here are a few more "typos". Strange that the only people who make this particular typo all have New Zealand URLs and include official publications and MPs as well as news outlets:

So what if someone feels uncomfortable about the truth, we need to deal to the problems - NZ Herald

prevention is what we need to deal to heart disease.- Gisborne Herald, NZ

gone on for long enough and we need to deal to it - Kaipara District Council, NZ

And we need to deal to address some of the challenges posed by a changing society - NZ Department of Health

So we need to deal to it [pruning the over-growth] or there will be no fruit next year. - Stuff.co.nz (and quite a few more from stuff.co.nz)

.. undermine Auckland's progress to become an internationally-competitive, attractive city to live, work and invest, and which we need to deal to,” says Mr Barnett ... - elocal.co.nz

So to `clean up' Zimbabwe it will be necessary to deal to the Army Generals as well as Mugabe - kiwiblog.co.nz

In New Zealand they are being labeled as lazy, untrustworthy and grasping and draconian legislation is necessary to deal to them - NZ Greens blog

RSA locals want to deal to attacker - NZ Online News

Third, we want to deal to the culture of welfare dependency - Act.Org.NZ

If we want to deal to crime, we must deal to the gangs - John Carter, (NZ) MP

In this news-hungry world, where we always want to deal to those who are ... Chester Borrows speaking to the NZ Parliamentary select committee - NZ Hansard

If you want to deal to it on a larger scale, spray with lime sulphur in winter when the tree is dormant - NZ Institute of Horticulture

Still typos?

@Jan - I'd never heard of agreeance before, (and its being red-lined by Firefox), but there's an interesting piece on it at - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agreeance - and quite a bit of discussion on forums etc.

@porsche - according to Online Etymology Dictionary you're absolutely right about animal. We apparently got it (via Old French according to Dictionary.com) from the Latin animale (n) "living being, being which breathes," the neuter of animalis (adj) "animate, living; of the air," which in turn came from anima (n) "breath, soul; a current of air".

Similarly, it has comic as an adjective from the 14th century, but as a noun only from the 1580s.

I seem to remember my favourites as being Devil's Cub and An Infamous Army; they may have been light books, but her eye to historical detail was excellent.

re: WW's last paragraph.I meant we're only allowed to see one in Google Books.

I'd forgotten all about "ton"; its a long time since I read any Georgette Heyer. To add a little to what Skeeter has said, it's from the French "bon ton", and refers mainly to members of the upper classes and to the fashionable.

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/bon-ton

In an article on Beau Brummel, Wikipedia says "His personal habits, such as a fastidious attention to cleaning his teeth, shaving, and daily bathing exerted an influence on the ton, upper echelons of polite society, who began to do likewise." Whether Brummel was ever accepted as a member of the ton, I don't know.

I can find only one reference in Jane Austen - "A clergyman must not be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress" (it seems she didn't mean mob in the way we understand)

There are three instances in Vanity Fair:

"Every visit which this leader of ton paid to her family was more unlucky for her"

"Scores of the great dandies of London squeezed and trod on each other on the little stairs, laughing to find themselves there; and many spotless and severe ladies of ton were seated in the little drawing-room"

"She wants ton sadly," said Mrs. Hollyock. "My dear creature, you never will be able to form her."

Doing a search for "bon ton" in Google Books gives quite interesting results: "Bon ton or: High Life above the Stairs" was the name of a play by David Garrick, published in 1781. A magazine called "Bon Ton" was published in 1818, although I don't know how long it lasted, and there was a novel published anonymously in 1820 - "Supreme Bon Ton: and Bon Ton by Profession". So it was obviously a well-known expression in regency times.

https://www.google.pl/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=bon+ton&btnG=

To return to Heyer, "Georgette Heyer's Regency England", by Teresa Chris, has 31 pages with references to "ton", but we are only allowed to see one: "prying eyes of the ton in London".

Both "bad" and "poor" have several meanings. Oxford Dictionaries Online list eight different meanings for "bad", one meaning being "of poor quality or a low standard:" for which they give these examples:

a bad diet
bad eyesight
a bad listener

Similarly they give three meanings for "poor", one of which is "of a low or inferior standard or quality:" with the examples:

many people are eating a very poor diet
her work was poor

I would say that in these meanings (but only these) they are nearly synonymous, with "poor" perhaps being a softer option. "Your test result was rather poor" doesn't sound quite as bad to me as "Your test result was rather bad". It seems to me you could substitute "poor" for "bad" in all the examples above, but I'm not so sure about the other way round.

But of course that leaves another seven meanings for "bad", and two for "poor", where they are not in the slightest synonymous. And one of those meanings of bad, for example, is "lacking or failing to conform to moral virtue"

The bad guys - morally bad
A bad boy - badly behaved

And surely the first meaning that comes to mind for "poor" is "lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society" - nothing to do with "bad" at all.

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/poor?q=bad
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/poor?q=poor