Mike
Carruthers:
Remember in school you were taught to never end a sentence with
a preposition?
Patricia O'Conner:
Well the truth is that people were ending sentences with prepositions
for seven or eight hundred years, including Shakespeare and
writers of the King James Version of the Bible.
Grammar expert
Patricia O'Conner, author of the book Woe
is I…
And nobody felt
that there was anything wrong with it until the latter part
of the seventeenth century when some Latinists decided that
it wasn't a good way to organize an English sentence. So they
invented a rule that it was wrong in English - well it's not,
it's perfectly normal in English.
Is it proper
to say, "It is I" or "It is me?"
"It is I",
but I think that only an English teacher would insist on that.
Nine times out of ten people will say, "It is me",
or "It's me." However, you don't say "Come to
the movies with Mom and I", you say "Come to the movies
with Mom and me."
And Patricia
says people get confused over the word "none".
A lot of people
think that the word "none" means not one, so that
it's always singular. But it's not really derived from not one,
it's derived from not any - and it can be either singular or
plural. "None of the cookies are left but none of the milk
is left."
Tomorrow is it
correct to use the word "data" singularly? I'm Mike
Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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