Before it was a Hemmingway title or a Metallica lyric, it was a line from a poem. I forget the title and author, but the full sentence was: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." And it was a meditation on death. In Europe, they

"Because of their heavy weight, the only thing they could have done would have been to stay on the ground forever," is an ugainly sentence. That alone is reason not to say it.

A think tank is simply a group of people who research issues and/or propose solutions. There are political think tanks, technology think tanks, military think tanks, etc.

You seem to have a firm grasp of it. What specifically bothers you about it?

In this forum, you'd think the censors would be blocking bad grammar.

In English, relative formality is less a question of grammar than of vocabulary and syntax, whereas other languages -- Spanish, for example -- use a different set of verb conjugations. In an informal situation, I might say, "Gimme that." But the

Generally, in English a noun precedes its verb: "I eat", "they went", "she drives", etc. That's why the noun and verb in question ("name" and "was") sound better in that order. Now, you might point out that English questions often reverse the

conjunction

What I meant -- and I think it's clear -- is that the other versions would be stilted in American English. To claim that only American English is unstilted would be absurd. Most people, when deciding between a logical and an illogical

Clauses contain a subject and a predicate. Phrases do not. There are two types of clauses: dependent and independent. The latter can be a sentence by itself. The sentence "He was a long-haul driver who kept his eyes on the road." contains an