5jj you've always been the best.
Ostap, you write some silly things at times, but that must count among the silliest. Until I stopped participating in threads started by you, I frequently expressed my impatience with you. In your heart, you probably think of me as the worst.
I guess I've been a pain in native speaker's butt lately.
What do you mean by 'lately'? you've been a pain in the proverbial for a long time, in my opinion.
When you learn a foreign language you're constantly searching for the truth.
OK, I'll be serious now. I have a certain sympathy with your search for the truth. I respect your rejection of glib responses - I have rejected glib responses throughout most of my life as a learner and teacher. BUT, and it's a big 'but': in your search for the truth, you allow yourself, I feel, to be led off into detailed questions of "Is it possible that in context A, given context B, utterance X might possibly be interpreted in this way?" You have an absolute right to ask such questions, but generally, they (or the responses) do not directly help you communicate effectively in English (In my opinion, I must add).
Native speakers are rarely as precise in their use of language as grammar books seem to suggest. Lexicographers can do only their best to define a word in the way that native speakers are seen to use words. Grammarians can, similarly, only do their best to explain how native speakers are seen to put the words together. The most modern of many grammars on my shelves, Huddleston and Palmer's
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language has 1764 pages, not including the
Further Reading, References and indexes. As yet I possess only the first of four volumes of Declerck's
Grammar of the English Verb Phrase - and that runs to757+ pages. And yet, despite the length (and weight!) of these works, much of what their authors write is
opinion, not fact.
The authors' opinions may well be more informed than mine (or anybody else's) but that does not mean that they are indisputably right. My personal feeling is that the more you try to pin people down to precise
yes/no absolute answers, the less likely you are to recive absolutely right answers - there often
aren't absolutely right answers. Language is the way in which people try to transfer ideas from one brain to another. It's a very effective way, but it is not absolutely perfect or logical, and it seems to have built-in fuzziness. Attempts to de-fuzz the fuzziness are, in my opinion, doomed. We can approach success in clearly though-out written work; in speech, many other factors clear things up. Trying to decide
exactly what spoken, or informally written, words mean is not possible at the moment. Science may find a way to do this in the future, but we can't do it today
