When setting out to fill in our fourth language poll, one of the readers of this blog found she wanted to leave all the boxes blank for the ‘less’  and ‘try and’ questions, but that the poll wouldn’t allow that. It is interesting to see that this issue only arose now. It didn’t come up with any of the other usage items, though one of our readers did comment a while ago that she considered that there were no problems in acceptability with any of the usage problems thus far.

The avoid any kind of unwanted presuppostion as to the acceptability of the constructions we are asking you about, we added an option “unacceptable under any circumstances”. At this point – the change was made early today – no one has selected this option yet, so it’ll be interesting so see when it first happens and what for, and also whether any of the other constructions comes in for this option as well. We will keep you posted.