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<p>I’ve also wondered that. I never knew that “yay/yea” had once been spelled “yea” until very late in my education. I far more often see “yea” as an alternate spelling of “yeah” in online speech.</p>
<p>^^Agree with the yea=yeah observation.</p>
<p>Here’s one that may just be another case of common usage overtaking the grammarians:</p>
<p>“used to” not as in, “to operate correctly”, but, to indicate something once done in the past on a regular basis, as in, “We used to visit the Cape every summer.” Correct or Not Correct?</p>
<p>^That’s definitely correct grammatically; foreign language textbooks often cite “used to” as one of the ways that English expresses a habitual past action, e.g. I used to play baseball. The other ways “I would play” and simply “I played”, while also correct, can be confused with other tenses whereas “used to” has just the one meaning.</p>
<p>[Where</a> did “used to” come from? - WordReference Forums](<a href=“used to - origin | WordReference Forums”>used to - origin | WordReference Forums) suggests “used to” comes from “to use” which comes from “to accustom” so “I used to play baseball” can come from “I was accustomed to playing baseball.”</p>
<p>^^that’s interesting. I’d completely overlooked the usage meaning, “to be familiar with” or “to be accustomed to” in the present tense, as in, “I’m used to doing it my way”. Either way, the verb “to use” is always spelled as if in the past tense. Weird.</p>
<p>The who/ whom issue mirrors exactly the usage of he/ him (the m is a hold over from Latin inflection). Most people wouldn’t say “to he,” but rather “to him.” Likewise, it’s “to whom,” not “to who.” </p>
<p>Is grammar (and words in the dictionary) supposed to be prescriptive or descriptive? It depends on whom you ask. What is considered correct also depends on the country, and historical decisions. In the 1800s, some now dead people decided that singular subjects must always take gendered singular pronouns, without considering the future possibility that many of us in the 21st century find the grammatically correct option of “everyone take out his or her pencil” long and stilted. Yes, we can turn it into “all students take out their pencils,” but it’s not quite the same. </p>
<p>We need to bring back sentence diagramming into our nation’s schools.</p>
<p>This is a common error I see on the boards…</p>
<p>Anyways </p>
<p>The correct word is anyway.</p>
<p>The biggest problem in my opinion is the use of “they” as the universal pronoun. People will use “they” all the time, even when referring to singular entities.</p>