Re: To waffle, ‘to waver, to vacillate, to equivocate, to dither’

 Ar an ceathrú lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh jerryfriedman:

 > Aidan Kehoe wrote:
 >
 >
 > >  Ar an chéad lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Antonio Marques:
 >
 > >  > >>>> Never mind that in the bit that Steve quoted to flippantly inquire
 > >  > >>>> on what 'that' meant, it was quite explicitly said 'dither'.
 > >  > >>>
 >
 > >>> The "it" there isn't idiomatic
 >
 > >  > >> The sentence sounded wrong to me, but even now I'm not sure why. As
 > >  > >> to 'it', maybe it's not idiomatic, but is it ungrammatical? I don't
 > >  > >> quite see it.
 > >  > >  > > "It" refers to "dither",
 > >  >  > No, it's an impersonal passive, and I've just found out that for the
 > >  >  > last 30/40 years I may have been using a construct that english
 > >  >  > doesn't have.
 >
 > > English does have an impersonal passive, and and what you wrote is
 > > grammatical, but again, not idiomatic. No one would have noticed or
 > > commented except that the sentence was posted to alt.usage.english.
 >
 > I disagree wth both sentences. What's an example of an impersonal passive in
 > English that anyone would say? And if Antonio tries posting sentences like
 > that on the Internet as, say, Anthony Marks, I'll bet it wouldn't be long
 > till someone asked him what his native language is.

https://books.google.com/books?q="it+was+said"

Now, a lot of those results are from court reports and so don’t qualify as
“anyone would say,” but that register of English is still English.

Is the British Council wrong?

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/c1-grammar/advanced-passives-review#:~:text=The%20impersonal%20passive%20has%20two,from%20the%20third%20century%20BCE.

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