Wordwizard

fascinating stuff,

Yes I wonder why the effects can be so violent

regardless of all that, in British usage it really is doggie paddle...

Hi Ken, you are lucky if you have not yet read much Waugh. He is a master of style. He used to be generally considered one of the greatest of English writers but seems now to be a bit out of fashion, perhaps partly because of his rather reactionary persona. I would recommend Scoop, Black Mischief or...

Yes "off of" is to be found everywhere, used with many verbs, very ugly and to be avoided on both sides of the pond. It has an unpleasant and very popular cousin: "must/could/should/may/might of" (replacing "have").

good point. They don't use present perfect in many places we do

The whole extract presents the passenger's personality in a certain light. Of the various possible descriptions, "impatient" springs to mind. This leads me to think the passenger would have preferred the shorter formulation, although an expletive would have lengthened it again.

the use of the past/preterit or the present perfect in the first verb surely changes everything. In the second example the event is linked to the present, so "she" could still have more children (or indeed "have still more children" - not the same meaning either). However one could argue that if thi...

i see you have taken your quotation from an article on CNBC, Steven, so in this case "enroll" would also be correct...

yes Yet slightly more difficult to achieve than Still in most situations.

this is not about correctness but about style, and flow.
I prefer (1)

I suspect irony in gdwdwrkrs post, steven

Sorry, I meant to put this in Miscellaneous. Mea culpa

Just to say that Marsh Heirs is again free on Kindle today and tomorrow - New years gift
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_no ... arsh+heirs

surely just scaffolding