Pooh and Piglet and Owl had a chat in Owl's house but it was blown down. Pooh sat on the floor which had once been a wall, and gazed up at the ceiling which had once been another wall, with a front door in it which had once been a front door, and tried to give his mind to it. This is form "The ...

Piglet opened the letter-box and climbed in. Then, having untied himself, he began to squeeze into the slit, through which in the old days when front doors were front doors, many an unexpected letter that WOL had written to himself, had come slipping. This is from "The house at Pooh corner". Wh...

When giving us the history of Jane Fairfax, Emma by Jane Austen has this line: Jane Fairfax was an orphan, the only child of Mrs Bates's youngest daughter. The marriage of Lieut. Fairfax, of the ——— regiment of infantry, and Miss Jane Bates, had had its day of fame and pleasure, hope and interes...

A lot of Romantic poetry (for e.g. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn") uses words like thou, thee and thy even though these had fallen out of use in regular speech sometime in the seventeenth century. Was this merely a poetic convention that was taken for granted o...