While I'm here however, I would like to know what happened to who. When did it become appropriate to refer to a person as that? It doesn't seem to matter whether the author is a child or a professional, who has virtually disappeared as a relative pronoun in dependent clauses over the last year or so. Now we get awful sentences like these: "He was the guy that gave me the cold shoulder." I think this is a subtle dehumanization creeping into our language.
Oh, and I have a grammar example almost everyone gets wrong, including most writers. I think it's because the now common but incorrect usage was popularized by American media, then radio and movies beginning way back in the early 20th century. It took the Brits longer to follow our bad example. Most people, when asked to point to themselves in a photo or some other similar scenario will say, "That is me." The correct pronoun to use is I, as in, "That is I." I is the subjective form of the personal first person singular pronoun, me is the objective form, and the above case represents an exception to subject and object rules. The subjective form of the pronoun is used after the verb to be. The same applies to the second and third person: "It was he who drew the picture."
Now I am fully aware of why my thread never made it out of the idea phase, this feels a bit silly.
On edit, someone correct my punctuation, thanks.
