Strikes me that such is probably for plural items and 'such a' for singular: such a bird can be very noisy; such birds can be very noisy.

"an unusual" The n is necessary for smooth pronunciation and so is put in between "a" and words that start with vowels.

The second one could be purely hypothetical, as in "he didn't say where he would go if the alarm sounded." In the first one, though, he has already gone someplace; he just didn't say where.

Two good Dutch expressions like this are "erg goed" (awfully good) and "zeer goed" (sorely good, which means 'really quite excellent'). As to what I think of the phenomenon, I think it might have begun as a device to ward off the jinx involved

I am a Canadian guy working for a Dutch institution, and I am often asked to correct people's English. A couple of years ago, I noticed that there was a strong trend to a (seemingly) new kind of comparative construction. Instead of saying,

In case anyone's still curious, "nature's law" is an ancient concept based on the idea that, just as things like stars and tides move in an orderly way reflecting some kind of divine logic behind the world, so must there be some sort of an