Dave: It’s done! I haven’t seen the actual duplicated items yet myself, but we’ve got ‘em. Sorry to disappoint on the fiber/jazz combination. (Just remembered this: One of my teachers, Karen, also referred to “whole-wheat love” and “high-fiber knitting”, but what she meant was the act of signing up for a knitting course because you thought it would be good for you, not just because you thought you’d enjoy it. :) )

I read the other day, a newspaper report that said “Hilary Clinton found herself.” It caused me to reflect upon the use of the past continuous and wonder whether it was more correct to say “Hilary Clinton has found herself.”

While we’re at it, how do you construct a sentence which ends in a quote? Chicago Manual of Style dictates one should say ‘The password is “abc.$def.”‘ There is some ambiguity whether the password ends with “f” or “..” I mean a single “.,” but was constrained by having to include the punctuation mark. Dammit, I’ve done it again.

The ideal statement, or question, should identify an event with as little ambiguity as possible. “Fit” to describe events in the past does not, whereas an insistence on injecting punctuation BEFORE an ending quote creates confusion.

Regarding ambiguity, I just loved the notice that appeared in my village grocers…”Please do not sit your children on the counter by the bacon slicer as we are getting behind with our orders”.

I too say “day-ta” and “stat-us”, and I’m a Hiberno-Deutsch goombah (in a purely spiritual sense, of course) from Jersey.