Oh, dear Marsha, you have indeed hit upon one of my great obsessions - the use of the nominative form of pronouns in prepositional or other objective phrases. It really does drive I completely nuts!! I have become the scourge of my company with my habit of correcting people (almost all of whom have at least BA's) when they say such dreadful things as, "Are you going to golf with Tom and I?" My poor secretary has become so paranoid about misusing "I" and "me" that she constructs her sentences to avoid using either. Lordie, what a grammar nazi I have become, no? But standards are standards; and our gloriously rich language is suffering enough wounds already with the hideous influence of hip-hop, Valley-girl talk, and other such abominations.

Another use of the language which drives I cuckoo is the verbizing of nouns. This irritating habit is particularly prevalent among MBA types who seem unable to talk in anything other than B-school (for those of us not in the MBA crowd, that means Business School) jargon. I often think that such people should wear a little sign with a statement such as, "Beware, I speak a peculiar language consisting of silly. trendy jargon with no real meaning." (Yes, Marsha, I do admit that these comments are coming from someone in a profession - law - that has its own monumental problems regarding the use of incomprehensible jargon. But I humbly, as opposed to realistically, consider myself outside of that paradigm (another hideous word) of jargon usage.)

Karen & Mr. Kimmi (aka John) - Can you add a spell-check feature to this site so that we can at least spell correctly even if our sentences make no sense otherwise? If you can add a good-sense-check feature, that would be nice as well, although that feature is needed far more on the CC site than on this one.

Cheers from Pat and I - Fred