Bad Grammar Among the Educated

OK, let's talk grammar...bad grammar.  There's just way too much of it, especially among the educated.  I blame the school system and the boobs who made occupations like lawyer and doctor pay at least ten times as much as being a schoolteacher.

We're all to blame.  When we get an outlandishly padded bill in a doctor's office, do we raise a stink over it?...No.  Well why not? Wimps, all of us...we should be ashamed.

Doctors resisted "socialized medicine" in the US and lobbied for "anything goes" aka the "free market".  Does anyone really believe that doctor's fees are controlled by free-market forces in the economy?  They wanted to be "free", so they should be prepared to dicker over prices and give estimates.  That's what free markets are, not fixed prices set by doctors and hospitals in secret meetings.

Back to grammar...

The word I is nominative, me is objective case.  So when soldiers risk their lives to protect our sorry butts, we should say they did it for you and me, not "you and I".  The word and is a conjunction, it has no effect whatsoever on case of personal pronouns.

So when a pop star sings "Between you and I", she's being stupid. It's "Between you and me", not "you and I".  Would you say "Between I and you"?...I hope not.

Next lesson...the word than is either a conjunction or a preposition.  People who insist that it can only be a conjunction are arrogant fools....who don't look things up in dictionaries because they think they're "educated" enough that they don't have to do things like that.

Two examples...."She's a better singer than I could ever hope to be."...."She's a better singer than me."  Both are CORRECT!

"She's a better singer than I" is clearly wrong.  In this sentence, a corruption of the second example, the word than is a preposition, so it should be followed by the objective case of the personal pronoun.  I wish educated people would buy dictionaries and use them before they spout their absurdities.  In the first example I gave, than is a conjunction.  In the second, it's a preposition.  The personal pronoun in the first example is "I" because it's the subject of a phrase containing a pronoun and a verb.

Trouble is, the widespread use of "taller than I", "to you and I" and other corrupt usage of English will continue...because they sound "educated".  It's like the snobbish phrases "It is I" and "aren't I"...they sound "upper class".  The correct things to say are "It's me" or "am I not" or even "ain't I".  "Aren't I" is dead wrong, "It is I" is just bad use of language.  The word is does not take an object, but the common usage is "It's me"...which is not wrong at all.  In French it's "C'est moi."  "It is I" is just plain snobbery, and it's been recognized as such by language scholars since the Eighteenth Century.  Don't be a snob, they're disgusting.

I once had an editor red-pencil the phrase "none were found" in something I wrote.  I demanded an explanation and he said none is singular....complete garbage.  None has no number, so it can't be singular or plural by any rule.  Zero is not a measurable quantity. In truth it doesn't exist.

The proper usage is to see the word none in context.  If you looked for survivors (notice...plural) after a disaster and "none were found", that's good usage, sad as it may be.  You were looking for as many as you could find, not just one and forget the rest.  But it's not a rule, it's just common sense...a foreign concept to that editor.

Seemed like everyone in academia and government agreed with that editor's confusion at the time..."none was" became the rule in all publications for a while.  I have visions of someone FINALLY referring to a freshman textbook of English grammar where the use of the word none is discussed.  "None were" has made a comeback since those dark days of foggy brains.

Anyway I refused to allow my work to be published with stupid "corrections" to my good use of English.  They went along reluctantly, shaking their heads.  I learned that the worst kind of fool is an educated one who's really only partly educated.  They can be appallingly certain when they make mistakes.