@jayles (who for some reason comes up in Google reader as jayles the unwise). I live and teach Poland (Central Europe), and while Polish has a few words of Germanic origin, it also has quite a lot from French, for example "etap, parter, ekran, plaża" and hundreds, probably thousands from Latin, many of them similar to the ones we have. If an English word ends in "ation", there's a good chance Polish will have a similar word ending in "acja".

It was one of the first things I learnt when I started teaching here: it's not the longer Latin-based words they tend to have problems with, it's the short Anglo-Saxon ones and phrasal verbs they don't get. In fact, I imagine "Introduction" would probably easier for most foreign learners than the phrasal verb based "Lead-in". That's rather an anglo-centric way of thinking, I would suggest. Actually, I don't see "lead-in" and "introduction" as being completely synonymous, but that's a different story..

Latin was not only the basis of Romance languages, it was the "international" and "official" language of its day in much of Europe, (to use a couple of somewhat anachronistic terms) - Domesday Book was written in Latin, for example. English was affected by this and the influence of medieval French, just as other languages today borrow words from English.

I've no objection to avoiding complicated long words, but what's wrong with doing this on a word-to-word basis, rather than this crude all Latin-based words are bad, all Anglo-Saxon words are good nonsense.

Actually, I think I'll start a campaign for Real British, that's to say the genuine native language of these isles, before that bunch of marauding foreign mercenaries, the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, led by Hengist and Horsa, brutally betrayed the trust of Vortigern, King of the Britons. This will be quite easy; only Brythonic languages, Welsh, Cornish and Breton, will be allowed in schools, and they will meld into one British language once again. Children will be punished for speaking any other, as they were for speaking Welsh and Gaelic a hundred years ago. Loan words will be allowed from the sister Goidelic languages, but from no other.

There's a lot of nonsense written on these pages about how wonderful the Anglo-Saxons and Norsemen were, and how awful the invading Normans were. But they had all been invaders in their time, and while the Norman invasion made life a bit awkward for a while, Anglo-Saxon culture survived. The Anglo-Saxon and Norse invasions, on the other hand, for whatever reasons, led to the almost total disappearance of Celtic culture in England. Nobody seems to be mourning that on these pages. Some people here seem to have a very selective (and I would say over-romanticised) idea of history, and of the history of the English language.

English is what it is in no small part as a result of the influence of other languages, especially French and Latin, but also Dutch and the languages of the Indian Sub-continent. For me, as an English speaker, this is something to celebrate, not something to moan about.

@Jo - that ending was a bit harsh, so I'll add a couple of these - :)), :))

@Jo - Ah, "correct English", that's a topic and a half, and I bet that you and I come at that from completely different angles. For me what is important is whether something sounds natural, not what some language guru or maven says. Garner often talks a lot of good sense but, I think, tends to concentrate on relatively formal written English, not spoken idiomatic English, which was what BJ originally gave us an example of.

To be honest, I pretty much distrust the whole idea of language gurus/mavens. But I do have a couple of usage manuals, both of which contradict your position. MWDEU, which unfortunately we can no longer link to, has a couple of examples -

"... So Breech ended the contract, as of June 30" - (Time Magazine 21 July 1947)
"I have revised the figures as of the end of 1967" - Center Magazine 1969

The editors of MWDEU go on to say - "This use of 'as of' need never be avoided; it constitutes the bulk of our printed evidence for the phrase."

And Burchfield, in the New Modern Fowler, says: phrases of this type, first recorded in the work of Mark Twain, are now well established in standard English in the UK and elsewhere."And his first example:

"I'm resigning, as of today"

As for your point about foreign students, I'd much rather hear my EFL students say something like "I'm leaving the company as of next Monday" than the Oh so correct "To whom should I give this?" or "This is he". I would be delighted if my students spoke more idiomatic language; it's the formal stuff they've learnt at school that's the main problem.

So from my point of view, there was absolutely no problem with BJ's example. And what got my goat was that what you were really commenting on was not BJ's point, but his use of language (in an informal setting), which for some reason you disapproved of. So in reply to your initial comment, yes, I rather think you were being anal.

@jo - Google brings up plenty of examples "quitting as of", and there are a couple of hundred in Google Books (i.e. proofread, edited material). Enough to suggest, perhaps, that this could in fact be idiomatic.

Hi andreea. it wasn't meant to be a dig at you, but at all the rest of us. Unfortunately I didn't read your comment properly before I did all that. If I had, I could have saved myself some work. But I enjoy doing that sort of stuff. :)))

Interesting question. I can't think why it took so long for someone to answer. A quick check for "selected from among" on Google Books suggests that sometimes there seems to be no difference:

"selected from among the inaugural dissertations" (1806)
"selected from among lectures and articles" (1907)

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22selected%20from%20among%22&tbs=bks:1&lr=lang_en

But in these quotations:

"A committee of 5 members is to be selected from among 6 boys and 5 girls." (2008)
"They were selected from among the ikbals", (2011)
"Three (3) members of the Industry Committee shall be selected from among growers in the South Georgia District" (1966)

it seems to me, that when we're talking about selecting from a group of people it sounds better with "among" than without. It seems to make them more of a group than simply a number of random people. (I think). So I tend to agree with andreea.

Google Books has 83 million hits for "selected from the", but a mere million for "selected from among the". Some of the books with "selected from among" seem to be quite old, and an Ngram graph would appear to confirm that the version with "among" is becoming less popular:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=selected+from+among&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Incidentally, Cambridge Dictionaries define "out of", as in "nine out of ten", as meaning "from among an amount or number"

@v pinches - Few commentators nowadays see any problem with using hopefully as a sentence adverb. In fact, I doubt that it is used that much to mean in a hopeful manner, and in any case there's unlikely to be any confusion.

Frankly can also mean in a frank manner - "He spoke to me frankly", but I haven't seen any great objections to "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn".

Other adverbs used both as adverbs of manner and sentence adverbs include "honestly, sadly, seriously, stupidly". How is "Hopefully, I'll be able to make your party" any different to "Sadly, I won't be able to make your party"? After all, someone can look at me hopefully or sadly. But for some unknown reason, all the criticism is levelled at hopefully. There ain't no logic in it.

@Tom Rose - I have to confess it always amuses me when the Guardian write something like - "such and such an actor has just won the Award for Best Actress".

But more seriously, long before feminism, my mother preferred to be called a manager rather than manageress because in those days manageress suggested a rather lower status (and salary). And in many other professions it's been the same: would we take an authoress as seriously as an author, I wonder? Authoresses and poetesses sound a bit like dilettantes to me; women who dabble in writing rather than serious writers. I would never call Jane Austen an authoress, or Sylvia Plath a poetess, for example. But see douglas.bryant's excellent comment for a more historical context.

I've never seen a status difference in the same way with actors and actresses, but this does seem to have been initiated by the actresses themselves. So perhaps they do perceive some difference, whether it be in status or, as someone has already mentioned, in pay.

Wiktionary suggests that the -ess suffix is often seen as sexist and is declining in use. I think we really have to leave this one up to the people concerned themselves - the actors/actresses. Perhaps we should just let actress go the same way as authoress and poetess.

@Gallitrot - you're quite free to use what language you want, and to avoid fancy foreign words if you like. I rather enjoy your use of words like "manifold", "bespattered" and "haughtiness". You're also free to campaign for others to do the same; I just don't want any restrictions forced on us.

Ever since people like Dryden and Defoe first mooted the idea of some oversight of English through an Academy or such like, the idea has been (rightly in my mind) rejected. The great glory of English is that it is 'We, the people', generation after generation, who decide on its development, not some authority, be it prescriptivist or linguistically so-called purist. The development of English has been closely associated with democracy; let its own development be similarly democratic.

And to say that English's roots are Teutonic, is for me a great over-simplification. Yes, it is a Germanic language, but right from the start, it had non-Germanic elements and later opened up to the international culture of its time. It is precisely this rich admixture, especially the French connection, which makes English so interesting, something I cherish.

There's also a small practical point. The Latin and French basis of many of our words makes it considerably easier for us to learn other European languages, and for speakers of European languages to learn English.

Finally, "sesquipedalian" may be a bit too "sesquipedalian" for you, but didn't you get a bit of a thrill when you first found out what it meant?

@Jan Morrow - does that mean you have no ideals (noun)? :))

More interestingly, there are times when either could be appropriate. Here are some example sentences from four different advanced learner's dictionaries:

"It's my ideal of what a family home should be."
"Sophie represented his ideal of beauty."
"the ideal of a free and democratic society"
"the socialist ideal of equality for all members of society"
"The ideal would be to have a place in the town and one in the country."

These are all from the entries for ideal, but idea could work equally well in these examples, but with a subtle difference in meaning.