[dofm]

> I suspect the difficulty here lies more with your reading of the quoted sentence. British grammar school education, for all the years it devotes to the enterprise, does not always succeed in teaching reading comprehension.

Well aren't you a genuine delight?

> Alas, even in your own example, when your British friends are "giving themselves away", you resort to an external signal, beyond the text, to determine provenance!

A possibility I addressed in the actual text you are responding to, where I started the sentence with "It is of course possible" and continued to clarify that "...so many of the situations…" I encounter it are localised.

It's almost like I was expressing just such an awareness of the limits of my assertion, isn't it?

[cwmoore]

Erstwhile elsewhere whilst among the midst of the unbeknownst, someone is singing along to Taylor Swift songs I would not recognize. In a democracy of ideas, it is the lightning and not the cloud that makes it thunder. You Britons do sound smart.