Mark A Mandel writes: Yeah. How in hell do English-speakers manage to say "He's gone" without the absolutely vital grammatical distinctions between the degrees of certainty implied by "I saw him leave", "I saw him put his coat on and then I heard the door open and close", "Somebody told me he'd left", and "I haven't seen him for an hour"? No joke: there are languages where you can't avoid these distinctions any more than you can avoid verb tense or biological pronoun gender in English. It depends on the question, eh? I wouldn't use "he's gone" for any of the above except the first. I would consider that sloppy speaking. More vague is, "He isn't here," which could mean "he left while i was here" or "he wasn't here when i got here", but if someone wants that level of granularity by asking, "Is he there?" that's unfair. So i don't think it's English's fault. rone -- "Alan Alda's all we are." - Kurt Cobain