The questions are in plain text because it's (very) legacy data. At this moment my developers are currently leaning toward making the maintainers of questions use a tailor-made markup; as the dba, I was hoping to ride to the rescue yelling "but wait - there's no need to go to all that hassle since Perl can seamlessly translate the question on the fly!". Lingua::EN::Inflect got me part of the way there - an already existing markup syntax & decoder would carry a lot of weight - but without a 2nd=>3rd person verb translation tool I'm stuck. Sounds like a fun module to write, but I'm one of the last guys you'd want writing a Lingua::EN module. :-) Since I'm one of the few Perl proponants at my company, I probably won't win the fight to have CGI generate the pages, and thus a nice perl syntax for the markup (like $to_be{first}{singular}{present}) probably won't happen. I agree English is contorted - check out the exceptions Damian mentions in his module & it's hard to argue the man isn't a saint for such an extraordinary job. (Yup, this does sound like a homework question, but it isn't. We do ask-a-nurse telephone triage, and we're moving to having the patients triage themselves via the web. Presentation means a lot, or so I'm told.) Thanks, everybody. Your help is appreciated.