My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

C
HARLES
D
ICKENS
, Nicholas Nickleby
It’s raining pronouns
In English – and certainly in British English – we use a little-known thing called
the weather verb an awful lot.
It is raining.
It is freezing.
It is in the nineties.
What  is  this  nameless,  shapeless  it  that  is  doing  all  these  things?  Well,  it  is
known simply as the dummy subject , a handy little word that enables us to get
to the part we all love: describing the weather. Without it we’d be going around
saying The sky is raining , the sun is hot , and so on, which might – perish the
thought – make talking about the weather boring .

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Getting tense
‘They said: “You’re Laurie Lee, aren’t you? Well just you sit there for the
present.” I sat there all day but I never got it. I ain’t going back there again.’