Mark's item on which in Patrick O'Brian's series highlights the most striking (to me) syntactic feature of the books. But I also like O'Brian's seamen's use of any gate instead of anyway . Too bad we can't hear the pronunciation: does any gate also have compound pronunciation, like anyway ? As opposed, that is, to a noun phrase any way in a sentence like I couldn't find any way to get the tree out of my car ?
Of course, any gate might occur in the movie `Master and Commander', but my confidence in Hollywood's linguistic sophistication is not immense.