the "dot" is required. (the only exception i know of comes from french, where Mme and Mlle -short for Madame and Mademoiselle- do not have a dot. the reason being, the last letter of the full word is included in the abbreviation. therefore, avenue

I agree with kitkat... the differences are legal, more than grammatical. lease often is longer-term, but not always.

dear pemmican... sounds like you have studied french (or another romance language)! logically, you are correct that BOTH events are future, but english grammar assumes that the future perfect will logically and contextually place the other event

and then there is esperanto, which theoretically has no exceptions... kitkat is right, things were eroding along nicely, languages were melding together, then gutenburg & co. came along with their silly machine and things started to fossilize,

in brief, who is an subject pronoun and whom is an object pronoun ... not that that stops anyone from using both incorrectly! these words are problematic only if you consider ending sentences with a preposition problematic. whom should follow

imagine two events taking place... one starting sometime in the FUTURE and continuing on and on, when the second one interrupts it (or at least takes place during the first event). the first event will use the future perfect (often followed by a

is linking verb a technical term... could you defing it please? and differentiate between linking and auxiliary verbs?

it seems to me that i have heard "conform to (the letter of) the law", but this sounds like legalese to me, and not common speech. it also seems more appropriate to abstract ideas, rather than to people

hmmm... 1) in the first sentence you have a progressive action (was having a bath) interrupted by sudden, singular outside action (the phone rang). i would be more likely to say i was "taking" a bath, rather than "having" one, but that might be

as if i were... as mentioned in another post, this is the final remnant of the past subjunctive in english. common vernacular usage of "as if i was" shows that this last vestige might also be on its way out of the english language...