Have you ever noticed that the BBC always writes NASA as Nasa in its news reports?

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I'm sure I was never taught this at school (is that why grammar schools are called grammar schools??). But lately I've start worrying about my grammar, gods knows why, and noticed that I naturally prefer to split infinitives even though this is considered bad English.

The classic example is the opening line of Star Trek:

Kirk says: To boldly go
When ( Read more... )

Tereza lent me her precious rare copy of Moscow Stations to get me in the mood for a weekend of heavy drinking in Moscow. It's a semi-autobiographical story of life in Russia in 1969, and begins...

"Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. They all go on about it, but I've never seen it. The number of times (thousands) I've been drunk or hung over ( Read more... )