Is there any hard-and-fast rules how italics should be used, especially with foreign words; or is it just a matter of taste? For example, in an academic literary essay, if I desire to use not so common a phrase such as 'faux pas' or

In the context of talking about morality and keeping up appearances, what does "convincing noises" and making of the noises mean? Does it just mean lies and other uttering ways of protecting one's facade? Cheers.

Yes, these kind of things are not really that rare. One makes errors in speech which one would not do in paper. Flow of speech is not something you have really prepared. We non-natives, for example, say 'sheeps' quite often, or at least I

That is called 'intrusive r' and it's most notably an RP phenomenon, although not all RP speakers do this. Also, some speakers of American English (mostly in the north-east part of the States), Australian English and New Zealand

If two plosives appear consecutively ( in this case /t/ and /d/), the first plosive is not released with the normal 'explosion'. This may cause the notion that the /t/ is not there.

I must second that. It would be amazing to being able to switch between AE and BrE, but I end up over-doing the one I'm not so familiar with. Then again, not even all native speakers are able to do this, so I'm not going be stressed out

I find it amusing how people are getting more and more lazy and, at the same time, inventive. To combine a swimming pool and a bar is the work of a genius, although, the good ol' Mitch Buchannon, who also goes by the name of David Hasselhoff,

And to make matters worse, I guess; or interesting (suit yourself): the earliest record of this word comes from the mid 16th century, according to OED, again.

I doubt I'd say 'I' as /ai/ in fast speech. More like just / ə /. That's a good point too, but it's not a schwa in my opinion. For me, it's the first vowel in the diphthong /aɪ/, as in "eye". In other words,

My Cambridge's pronunciation dictionary gives only /ki:n/. Look at this also: http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Keane