Show IT IS ME edwin j tobin bupt supt ot of schools of cook county ill HI appears lo 10 0 o have extended an to an avalanche of air and N ihen lien the storm gathers ull full force and breaks about the heal of if processor tobin he nay regret roly y his concession to modern demands the act for which profesor proffesor sor tobin will likely be censured and which may result in a nationwide nation wide wida controversy consists iu in this he recently roc cutly sanctioned the use by both teachers and pupils ot of the expressions it Is me and he dont superintendent tobin says the corrace form it is I 1 sounds stilted and even egotistical and contends that it does no good to teach children forms of expression outlawed by common usage and a q sense of good form he adds that he is not instructing ting his teachers to depart from grammatically correct usages but will not reprimand them it if they do i so far ar as usage goes mr air tobin certainly is right when lie he says that i the correct form is seldom employed perhaps not more than one out of one thousand persons in ordinary walks of 0 life would inform an inquirer 1 that it Is il I 1 the other ninety hundred huldred and ninety nine would quick ly and unhesitatingly answer its me except in the written word the expression does not Is nowa nowadays seldom employed it Is rarely used except when a person seeks to make his assertion positive dont Is the common expression and it is used in conversations by even the highest authorities on ian languages gua carelessly no doubt but used nevertheless the chief danger ot of the widespread use of such incorrect expressions is their influence for destroy ing the technical accuracy ot of a Ian language guage eventually it becomes extremely difficult to establish the foundation of a word by derivation and root when the word has been mutilated that too is the principal objection I 1 to simplified spelling its peril to basic principles express innumerable words and expressions which are accepted asgood usage today were distinctly bad usi us l i age only a few years ago the I 1 people insisted and persisted in using I 1 the incorrect form and so general became the practice that the lexi cog raphers were compelled to put them into their books usually these I 1 definitions are accompanied by a noi noi i tation but the notation does not lessen their employment by everin ever in creasing numbers and in time even the notation is omitted and the word or expression becomes good naturally there are limits beyond which even usage cannot be per j milled ditled to prevail but those limits are neither well defined nor very observable the dictionaries of halt half a century hence may well be expected to sanction with explanatory reservations mr air it is me and he dont after all a language is but a means of expressing thought |