@HolyMackerel - I appreciate what you say, but I wouldn't rely overly on Strunk and White. Their bit on the Passive is absolute nonsense, and usage mavens of this sort rarely follow their own advice in their own writing. Orwell's famous essay where he both advises not to use the passive and to use Anglo-Saxon words in favour of latinate ones is riddled with passive verbs, and I''ve no doubt with latinate words. He was a good writer; he knew when to break his own rules.

@Gallitrot - of course anyone can say what they like about the language, although I prefer to avoid passing judgement - I leave that to prescriptivists and pedants. And from reading some of what you've written earlier in this thread, you are obviously very knowledgeable on this subject, much more so than me.

What I'm saying is that serious historians don't tend to try and rewrite history, and I very much doubt that people who study Old and Middle English academically or professionally would have much time for this sort of thing. And yes, I do respect the views of people who know about these things. Take David Crystal, for example. He has recently been working with a theatre company in Canada to try and recreate exactly how the works of Shakespeare would have sounded in his day. That is a worthwhile exercise, as is trying to reconstruct what Old and Middle English sounded like, a the differences in dialects you were discussing above. That is what I call serious scholarship. And I'm sure that amateurs can add their bit. You have obviously made a deep study of the English of the period, isn't that fascinating enough?

I can see that recreating a modern Anglo-Saxon might be an interesting exercise, but where you lose me is when you try to extrapolate this to modern English, as if you would have liked English to have existed in some sort of cocoon. When you put it forward as an alternative to the English we love and speak, then you start standing on the toes of people like me who like our language just the way it is, thank you very much, and who just say or write what they think fit, without constantly thinking of the derivation of the words we use, who like having choices. And who disdain most of the other prescriptivist nonsense. For telling people they should use Anglo-Saxon based words in preference to Latin or French based words is just as prescriptivist as saying we must say "Whom do you love?" instead of "Who do you love?".

Of course you're free to say and write what you like, but as long as you use words which don't appear in my dictionary, like propone, I'm afraid I can't take you very seriously (especially when you then follow it with "observation", as Latinate as they come). I like good natural English, and this all sounds rather artificial to me. I'm sure it's all great fun, and intellectually challenging, but it doesn't have much to do with the English of the last five hundred years, as far as I'm concerned. And apart from Chaucer and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and one or two others you will know more about than me, that means the English of the bulk of English literature. My problem is that I was just never into fantasy. And I can't stand any sort of prescriptivism.

Ironically, looking back at this, I imagine that the vast majority of the words I've used are in fact of Anglo-Saxon or French origin, and not too many of them are "effete, elevated or overly academic", I hope. But that's just the way I write, there's no deliberate thought to it.

@JohnN - Yes, you're absolutely right, as I found out later when I commented on that LL post. All very embarrassing! I am of course used to seeing (and using) this convention you mention in film and book titles, but these rarely involve punctuation.

British newspapers don't appear to use this convention in headlines or article titles and so I was a bit knocked off-course when I saw it. It's certainly the practice for the NYT and the Wall Street Journal, but not, for some reason, the Washington Post, which follows the same conventions, as far as I can see, as British newspapers.

A couple of random examples from today's NYT:

In Italy, Illusion Is the Only Reality
Before Cyprus Election, Gloom and Voter Apathy

Silly me! Although I still find it looks strange. But then I wondered about a certain controversial book on punctuation, and of course it uses the same convention: Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Damn, I hit the wrong button! That unfinished sentence should read - And I find changing the meaning of some existing words like "bespeak" really annoying and confusing. When I see it with its standard (literary) meaning of suggest - "His style of dressing bespoke great self-confidence." I just about understand it, but the way it's being used on this page, I have to stop and wonder what the hell's going on. I'm afraid the only word I can think for this is Latin-based - obfuscation.

OK jayles, and I usually try to avoid these words, but in science they can sometimes add a bit of precision, no doubt. And you could say just the same (about one-upmanship) about business buzzwords, and very few of them are latinate, except for the habit of verbalisation, and even then the source words are often not latinate.

To me it's just another silly rule: don't use passive, don't use nominalisation, don't use any redundancy, don't use latinate words. What about just using common sense and good judgement instead? And you can see what this argument taken to its extreme leads to in Gallitrot's comments: all these artificial words, or using words like "infill" with a completely new meaning. It may be a fun parlour game, but it has little to do with modern English. I have to agree with a previous commentator (from about five years back). I find all these so-called "Saxon" revivals or neologisms rather annoying. And I find the use of some existing words words like "bespeak" rather more pretentious than

As I said before, it comes from a very selective reading of both English history and the English language. Serious students of the English language like David Crystal have very little time for these source-based prejudices. And I doubt if one serious scholar of Anglo-Saxon languages has joined this Anglish movement.

@Gallitrot - I'd also quibble with the word "supercilious" being the exact equivalent of "haughty". My dictionary defines "supercilious" as "behaving towards other people as if you think you are better than they are", and gives the example "The dress shop assistant was very supercilious." The important words for me here being "as if you think". Now I'm not saying the upper classes are in any way superior to the rest of us, but I can imagine a duchess being referred to as haughty, but probably not supercilious. On the other hand, a jobsworth might well be referred to as supercilious but probably not haughty. That same dictionary has haughty as being synonymous with arrogant, and supercilious as being synonymous with superior. It is this enlarged palette of nuanced meanings that is one of the things that makes English so fascinating for me, you have so many choices. If you reject all Latin-based words and French-based words, you lose these possibilities. Not to mention not having to repeat yourself.

@gallitrot - (belatedly) by all means substitute Anglo-Saxon based words for Latin based ones if that's what floats your boat, but at least choose equivalents: "lexicography" is exclusively to do with the the theory and practice of compiling and writing dictionaries, a "wordsmith" is someone who an expert in the use of words or whose vocation is writing, as the use of the word "smith" would imply. Wordsworth was certainly a wordsmith, but as far as I know, not a lexicographer.

Incidentally, the word lexicography has apparently been around in English about two hundred years longer than wordsmith. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

@Carl - as this excellent post by linguist Stan Carey at Sentence First shows, it is fairly ubiquitous.

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/would-of-could-of-might-of-must-of/

But comments about it seem to come mainly from the States, and it has even appeared in an advertisement in the New York Times Magazine - "Our Store Hours Were Stated Incorrectly And Should Of Read ...". (quoted in Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage)

In answer to the question, I agree with mshades, and this dictionary entry supports that:

http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/gift

But there seems to be one exception - when God or gods are involved. A random fifty examples at the British National Corpus almost exclusively used "from", except for this one:

"Where Wesley stressed faith as a gift of God, Locke stressed reason as a gift of God"

http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=a+gift+of&mysubmit=Go

According to this Google Ngram graph, "gift of God" has historically been more common than "gift from God", although it suggests that things are changing:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gift+of+God%2Cgift+from+God&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

"gift of the gods" vs "gift from the gods" shows a similar story, but here the "from" version has now overtaken the "of" version:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gift+of+the+gods%2Cgift+from+the+gods&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Incidentally, it looks as though the preference for "from" rather than "of" is fairly recent, on both sides of the Atlantic:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=was+a+gift+from%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cwas+a+gift+of%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cwas+a+gift+from%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Cwas+a+gift+of%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

@mshades - On the contrary, you were quite right to use "between". It's nonsense that "between" can only be used for two, and anyone who gives you a smacking for it has only learnt half a rule. When we see things as a group, yes we use "among", but when we see them as individuals, we tend to use "between". This is from the OED:

"It [between] is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely"

"The Republic of Poland, a country in Central Europe, lies between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia to the north." - UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies