Alexander Koryagin to Anton Shepelev:

AK> Can I use "using" without an article ("I saw strange
AK> using...")?

As a noun?  Yes, you can, but not in the parenthetical
example:

   I was surprised at Phil's using an HP thin client as
   an MS-DOS and Windows 98 retrocomputer.

AS>> "He seemed read a menace in the flicker of the
AS>> firelight"
AK> In my case "the other" was not a "bare infinite" -- the
AK> first one is in Past Simple(seemed) and other is also in
AK> Past simple (read).

When I entered these restrictions into my English parser
and bid it reparse the sentence, it panicked!  Where in the
wild have you seen an apposition of two verbs in Past
Simple?  Perhaps Parser and I can understand you better by
analogy?

AK> Is your English parser is also a spell checker?

No, but it comes with a built-in typo-generator, even as
your OCR firmware with a excellent typo-detector. Sometimes
I wonder which is better: my typo-generator or your typo-
detector...

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