>Don't know what you're on about. You did mix your metaphors, whether you intended to or not.

That was not the intent, but can happen occasionally. Just a bit of a hobby I started recently - more of putting together things that were together in separate pairs, all together now, or sometimes just taking a piece of a phrase literally. Metaphors not required.

... for the very first time after time and again
... don't bogart that joint venture
... for hours on end of the world
... raise the bar bell for everyone
... you can hear the hills rolling
... then the paramilitary band played a polka.
... it only goes to show, doesn't go to hide.

>Your "try and do x" is equivalent to "do x and try" refers t the quirk of English whereby if we want to say "try to do X" we can say "try and do X".

And that quirk is annoying me, specially in the case of "we'll try and convict the guy"... huh? And I've found this to be blacklisted as one of the more frequent errors in current usage.

>Another quirk is "This ice cream needs to be put in the freezer before it melts" can be said "This ice cream needs putting in the freezer ...", and even more corrupt "This ice cream wants putting in the freezer ..." (but i'm not sure if that's a Brit-only usage)

Oh, I thought that was local here :).

>BTW What's up with all this [unspellable] stuff you're putting in messages lately? You've never had any problem in the past, and some are easily spellable.

Back in the old days, VFP was running UT and the templates for its pages were done in UTF-8, and we were an international forum. Now with all this progress these templates are done in (probably default, and as is M$'s genetically welded behavior, wrong default is the default) content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" - which means Western. This makes anything but the 26 characters practically unusable; anything with diacriticals will be automatically castrated into its uncritical version. C-acute becomes c-obtuse. This default codepage being Western, I probably may manage to spell a few German or French names, but I'm not playing favorites (in Serbian: not making a difference :), I'll either be able to write ALL these non-English characters equally, or they will remain unspellable, as a show of international solidarity.

Also serves as a reminder of how seriously I take this equality thing, and the frequency with which these come up in regular conversation.