[greymule]

Oh...and never, ever, begin a sentence with "and."

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

More recently:

"And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay.* And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

In defense of our elementary school teachers, although some of the "rules" they gave us weren't really formal rules, they were good advice for kids learning to write. Without the "don't begin with and" rule, kids tend to string short statements together with one and after the other.

I suspect that rewriting the ASA book for maximum clarity and correctness would not lengthen it much and might even shorten it slightly. I'd like to see something on the order of an annotated ASA book, like Jim Evans' effort with the OBR book. Not that I'm expecting one soon. An ASA rule book in Elizabethan English would be nice, too.

It is true that the King James bible reflects a somewhat different set of rules for English. For example, Jesus says, ". . . for their's [today, theirs] is the kingdom of heaven," and "Whom [today, who] do men say that I am?"

*In this old-fashioned usage, "joyous, happy, merry, lighthearted."