Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

My son Kevin left for his home in Fargo today, but not before we had our usual conversation about the decline in the use of the English language. It was great. But if you hated diagramming sentences in grade school — or if you never diagrammed in the first place — the rest of this essay will be boring. You’ve been warned.

It all started when I commented that the objective first person pronoun “me” is disappearing from the language and being replaced by the subjective first person pronoun “I” in inappropriate places. For instance, when one says, “Kevin and I received the book from Earl” all is well. But when one says, “Earl gave the book to Kevin and I” all is not well. Yet I hear this and similar phrases a lot. Kevin concurred. So I launched into my diatribe about the disappearance of “it” as the third person neuter pronoun and its being replaced with “they.” Kevin came back with an equally intense diatribe about the disappearance of the proper possessive apostrophe and when an A should be an italicized A. He got me on that one.

“And gerunds,” I said. “Nobody uses the possessive with a gerund anymore. It’s disgusting.” “Right,” he agreed. “I usually tell my students to avoid them. And dangling participles too.”

Then we got into the subtle nuances of some verbs like “lie” and “lay” or “hang” and “hang,” followed by the distinction between “between” and “among” and “peak” and “pique.” For the record, people lie down but plates lay on the table. And we hung pictures on the wall when we moved in, but we hanged Saddam Hussein.

Neither Kevin nor I think our passion for the minutiae of grammar is odd, but we know others don’t share this interest. And, truth be told, most people make themselves understood without speaking perfect English; so there is little incentive to correct those dangling participles or unpossessed gerunds.

Next time we’re together I want to discuss the tendency for nouns to become verbs. I’m waiting for someone to say, “I mapquested the route this afternoon.” I’ll roll my eyes, and Kevin will understand.