A lot of little rules English teachers try to force people to follow come from some time a few centuries ago when Latin was all the rage, when some people decided that, hey, English should be Just Like Latin, and so they invented nonsense like no splitting infinitives and no prepositions at the ends of sentences and so on. A lot of these other rules that people insist upon, such as having the object of "be" be in subject form ("this is I" rather than "this is me"), are rules that actually once were part of English but have generally not been followed for ages (this particular one has been shrinking in usage for 400 years, and I think that it's only because of English teachers and their spawn that it hasn't gone away completely). I don't really undestand why people think that some arbitrary form is automatically correct no matter what most people say, because the fundamental definition of any language *is* common usage, and I don't see how an ethereal "rightness" takes precedence over that.

On a related note, does anyone ever say "whom" anymore except in formal little figures of speech? Seriously. I think "whom" will be dead within two hundred years.

-Eric Sleator
Wed 6 Nov A.D. 2002