But, Kev, creativity wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about communication. And if I have to wonder what someone is saying to me, then there's a problem. If the problem comes again and again from the same person then I cpnclude that the problem is him, not me.

And if someone continues to use grammar, words, etc., that are inappropriate to the medium, then that person's message becomes lost, or at least watered down. As an example, if a person says to me that he cannot afford to pay the principle of his loan, I absolutely do not care whether he is thinking principle or principal. But if he writes to me and repeatedly makes mistakes such as using principal when principle is meant, then I begin to discount his communication to some perhaps very small extent. If, for further example, the communicator continues to use an improper agreement between subject and verb I will to some extent question his or her educational level. If it isn't educational level its certainly obvious to me that the person trying to communicate doesn't care very much about being received properly.

The above is about formal expository writing, not for the informalities we have here. I can pretty much always figure out what a person really means here, and it doesn't bother me a bit that I have to do some figuring, but in formal writing I should not have to do that.

As a general rule I tend to be very precise in my writing, whether here or in a more formal setting, but that's because that is how I have trained myself in my 30 plus years of writing for a living.

But I can double damned assure you that I don't see a particle of difference between 'with which I'm not familiar' and "which I'm not familiar with" except to wonder why you had two different quote styles in the same sentence. And I think I assume correctly that you would use the latter when talking with someone. So would I, but in writing even in an informal setting I will automatically use the former. Blame it on my particular gene pool. Both my parents were really big on rewriting, and this was back in the days when we had these things called typwriters. If I wrote something for school and they didn't like it I'd have to retype it.

And when I began writing stuff for GAO I pretty much had to do all my own final typing, so I quickly trained myself to get it right the first time. If I needed to write a letter I'd put an original and three carbon sets in my trusty old Remington 26 and start typing. It took five years to convince them to use xerox instead of carbon for retained copies! The other adjudicators all thought I was crazy, but I wasn't waiting three to four WEEKS for the understaffed and incompetent typing pool to return a polished copy of a draft.

TEd