>>>"Manifest" as in "patently obvious from its invisibility"? Maybe, if you knew what you were looking for.
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>>As in the old jokey paradox (from roll-calls at meetings) about someone being "conspiquous by his absense"
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>Ah, the AB sense... sorry, I'm not capable of ESP.

Look, in essence, if you write "I'm not going to comment on that" everyone then knows that you aren't.
If you write nothing, then everyone subconciously knows it anyway, by the fact that you haven't.

It's like when I was given training in formal letter writing, you don't start off by saying: "I am writing to complain ..." - it's obvious you were writing by the existence of the text.

Rather you write "This is to complain ..."

>
>"conspiqueueous by absence" - is when something you expect is not there. Don't tell me you expected me to write about knockers vs ringers (which ended with a victory by the guests, 2:3, though the last goal was under suspicion for offside).
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>>"It's been years since we arrived here ..."
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>>or "We've been here for years"
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>>In the song "Here comes the sun": "It seems like years since it's been here" "Since" denotes something that happened in the passed. You can say "We've been here since Clinton was in power"
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>The implied finiteness or continuousness of English verbs... I know the distinction very well, in Serbian et al there's always at least one continuous verb and usually a dozen finite verbs derived from it. For instance, "šetati" (to stroll) is continuous, but "odšetati" (to stroll away), "prošetati" (to have a bit of a stroll), "ušetati" (to stroll in or into) are finite, i.e. they are an one-time action.

Generally we use the continuous tense to denote something we're doing (note I use it here) at the moment.

e.g. "I an going for a walk", "I am walking"

but things we tend to do, or do occasionally, or at appointed times (including all the time), we use the plain tense:

e.g. "I go for a walk each day", "I walk when I'm not in the USA", "I walk with limp"


compare "I run this business" (all the time) with "I'm running the business while the boss is on vacation"

BUT "I run the business when the boss is on vacation" (at appointed times).

German's tend to have problems with the continuous:

"Since I am in England I am eating fish and chips" ("Since I came to England I've been eating fish and chips" or "While I'm in England I eat fish and chips")


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>In English, however, I have no idea when would a verb be understood as finite or infinite, or which verbs are always taken as one of the two. It's very blurry to me.
>
>>>>2 "m"s in "accommodation"
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>>That particular word really bugs me to write, because of the double-double. How about Mississippee? :-)
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>::)) or:):), that is the question.

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