Hello Marius Hancu,
Thank you for your effort in trying to point me to the right
direction. I believe that we are closer than it appears, unless you think
otherwise. If you allow me to button up what we have exchanged, here are my conclusions
regarding the usage of ‘In these days,’:
#1. To mean ‘now’, the phrase is a poor substitute for ‘These
days’, ‘Nowadays’, or ‘Presently’. I believe both of us addressed this in our
earlier posts.
#2. When it is used to describe days in the past as in the Princeton’s passage, it is appropriate as you stated in
Post: 456735 .
I think you would give the same assessment to the text posted on a webpage of
Stanford’s Community Reading Project, http://dickens.stanford.edu/archive/tale/issue5_gloss2.html,
#3. Based on #2, I interpret that ‘In those days,’ and ‘In these
days,’ are contextually the same but used with different perspectives. The
former seems to take a detached viewpoint - the author narrates an event as
an outsider; while the latter sends a merging message – the author paints a
picture as an insider sharing the event’s period.
Regarding ‘In these
days and ages’, I still don’t understand the reasons for its use by
Theodore R. Marmor, et al. or by those you called government bureaucrats. Since
those professional native people put that in print, I cannot say that the
phrase is ‘bad’ without a clear understanding. Until the day I find out why, I
stick with the idiomatic one, ‘In this
day and age’.
Best Regards,
Hoa Thai