Oh, no it's not!

@Maekong Mike - "Me is a subject pronoun. Myself is reflexive" - Well, yes, "myself" is reflexive, but that's only a half the story: "myself" etc are also emphatic pronouns:

"I did it all myself"
"I want to speak to the minister himself, not some lacky"
"The hotel itself is OK, but the food's not up to much"
"I can't believe we are still arguing about this, myself"

- those are not reflexive, they are emphatic. And incidentally, "myself" etc are used either reflexively "I hurt myself", "I couldn't control myself", or emphatically "I did it myself, nobody else was to blame" - I'm not sure what you mean by "reflexive emphasis".

But most glaringly of all, "me" is not, of course, a subject pronoun, it's the objective form (or case if you prefer) of the pronoun. Virtually nobody uses "myself" as a subject pronoun, but a quite a few of us see no problem using "myself" as an object pronoun after "and" - "There were Tom, Dick, Harry and myself", which Burchfield, in the third edition of Fowlers, calls"beyond reproach".

In Scotland it has an additional meaning - "I need to take a day off" - "Oh, you'll need to speak to himself"(ie the boss) , or "And how's yourself today". I'm not sure if it's Scottish usage or standard British English, but "And yourself" is quite a standard reply to "How are you" where I come from.

"the language is moribund anyway" - a strange word to use for a language that is continually being played with and extended, and which is possibly the most influential language there's ever been.

@vmoll - I seem to be missing something here. Up until you there had only been two commenters on this thread, Skeeter Lewis and me, neither of whom have expressed the slightest bit of rage.

As to "I ain't gots no pencil" of course it's language - it may not be your language and it may not be my language, and it may not be appropriate for the classroom, for example. But it's certainly language, no doubt following the rules of, and understood by, the dialect group who use it.

"Ain't got" is common in both AmE and BrE dialects, although "gots"is a new one on me, and standard English is probably almost unique in not allowing double negatives. Standard English they ain't, but you can often hear them on the streets of London.

@Skeeter Lewis - that's possible for the duke, but unlikely for 'the same exact time', I would have thought. But I grant you that in many cases 'exact' could be taken to mean 'precise', such as this one:

"And yet the bee had been for thousands of years, in all countries, unerringly working according to this fixed rule, choosing the same exact angle of 120 degrees for the inclination of the sides of its little room",1851

But this one seems to me more like 'exactly the same':

"appeared to me the same exact hue", 1856

But point taken; maybe I got a bit carried away on 'the same exact'. But I stand by the older use of "the exact same":

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+exact+same%22#q=%22the+exact+same%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1899

Judging by Ngram, 'the exact same' started being used more often around 1970, as did to a much lesser extent 'the same exact', but 'exactly the same' is still by far the most common. The Ngram figures also seem to suggest that this modern upsurge is a largely American phenomenon. The percentage for 'the exact same' is roughly three times higher in American books than in British ones, and 'the same exact' hardly registers in British books.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=exactly+the+same%2Cthe+exact+same%2Cthe+same+exact&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cexactly%20the%20same%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthe%20exact%20same%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthe%20same%20exact%3B%2Cc0

But I have to say that there are plenty of British examples of 'exact same' around, too:

"Rather embarrassingly for Labour, Cameron and Miliband have the exact same levels of trust in Scotland: 23 per cent.", New Statesman

"These applications covered the exact same area as the single application for the 18 homes.", The Scottish Parliament

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, the first example is from 1973, but there's one for 'the same identical method' from 1947. 'Exact same', incidentally, has been used by respected writers, and in respected places, including by John Updike in the New Yorker (1982).

But we can do much better than that. At Google Books there are 43 examples of 'the exact same' from the first half of the nineteenth century, including several from British publications:

"and the carpet is the exact same pattern of the one in the dress-drawing-room of Eglintoun castle", The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, 1820

"No two translators could have hit upon the exact same form of expression", the Quarterly Review, 1834

The earliest example at Google Books, is from The Bee, published in Edinburgh in 1722:

"but he suspects Arcticus, who is a scotsman, will not admit it to be of the exact same import with the other."

There are even more examples of "the same exact" from 1800 to 1850, just over 90, and we even can go back to 1685 :

"though not eve'y where and in all places according to the same exact time", A Complete History of England, 1685

"Our Men answered them by Plattoons, with the same exact Order as if they had been only excrcising.", The History of John Duke of Marlborough, 1742

So there's nothing new about the expressions themselves, although they have always been minority usages - from books published before 1800, Google Books have perhaps 10 examples of 'the exact same' and maybe 18 for 'the same exact', but over 200 for 'exactly the same'. What is relatively new is their increasing popularity, especially of 'the exact same'.

There's quite a lot of discussion about 'the exact same' on the web, at, amomgst other places, Grammarphobia and Stack Exchange, and on this forum in 2006: http://painintheenglish.com/case/1006/.

As to why? That's a trickier one to answer ? Perhaps because we're already used to things like 'the very same' - "They both arrived at the very same time".

Here's a link to the entry for 'wer' in the Bosworth -Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which has several definitions:

I. a man, a male person
II. a man, a male that has reached man's estate
III. a being in the form of a man
IV. a married or a betrothed man, a man (as in man and wife), a husband
V. a male

http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/035342

We seem to have two references in Beowulf, written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries:

'se æt Heorote fand wæccendne wer wiges bidan'

which one website translates as 'he found at Heorot a waking man waiting for war

(http://www.as.wvu.edu/english/oeoe/english311/1398.html)

'wonsæli wer weardode hwile', where 'wer' is variously translated as creature or wight:

the unhappy creature occupied for a while
the hapless wight a while had kept

But while Chaucer uses 'wif' quite a lot to mean a woman, and 'man' to mean a man, there doesn't seem to a single instance of 'wer' in the Canterbury Tales (end of 14th century), so it had presumably died out by then.

Lets get the easy one out of the way first - Ayatollah is Persian, Ayatullah is Arabic,:

Persian: آيت‌الله‎ ayatollah from Arabic: آية الله‎, āyatu allah (Wikipedia)

As for the Lebanese group, though Wikipedia lists it as Hezbollah, the nearest transliteration would be Hizbullah:

حزب الله‎ Ḥizbu 'llāh

I know nothing about Arabic, but I imagine the o/u sound could be interpreted either way, and we know that S often has a Z sound in English. Also, there are regional variations of Arabic, so pronunciation no doubt differs from place to place, added to the fact that there is probably no official transliteration (as in Chinese) as many countries are involved.

At Ngram, Hezbollah is by far the most common, (but Hizbollah in British books, for some reeason - but I think that might be an aberration), not only in the English collections, but also in French, Spanish and Italian books. In German, however, Hisbollah is the most common.

In English books, Hizbullah and Hizbollah, get less than half of Hezbollah (but see British books, above). Hisbollah and Hesbollah hardly register. Incidentally Firefox red-lines all but Hezbollah.

At the BBC, Hezbollah is by far the most common. (541 -real hits), as it is at the Guardian, Independent, Times. But interestingly, at the Economist, Hizbullah gets 622 to only 237 for Hezbollah.

The next most common at the BBC is for Hizbullah (336),but it's nearly all from the BBC Turkish service, so that looks like the standard Turkish spelling.

Hizbollah gets 157

Hesbollah brings up the BBC Romanian service (63)

Hisbollah gets only 23 - many in Welsh, Portuguese and Spanish.

So if you want to go with the flow it looks like it's Hezbollah, but if you want to be more faithful to the original Arabic - Hizbullah.

From Etymonline -

'Old English man, mann "human being, person (male or female)'

From Oxford Online (usage note)

'Traditionally the word man has been used to refer not only to adult males but also to human beings in general, regardless of sex. There is a historical explanation for this: in Old English the principal sense of man was ‘a human being’, and the words wer and wif were used to refer specifically to ‘a male person’ and ‘a female person’ respectively. Subsequently, man replaced wer as the normal term for ‘a male person’, but at the same time the older sense ‘a human being’ remained in use.'

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/man

The day people stop inventing new words: that's the day we should start worrying about the state of English. But of course they won't, because people are creative with language, especially young people. A lecture at Ted Talks to illustrate the point:

http://www.ted.com/talks/anne_curzan_what_makes_a_word_real?language=en

Re: Banjo's spelling idea -

In most words starting "ec", a single c is followed by a consonant, "eclaire, eclectic, eclipse, ecstatic, ectoderm, ectoplasms, eczema" - all with a short e as in "bed", and "ech" words simply follow the same pattern, as do "ecc" words. (For a list of all words starting "ec" see: http://www.morewords.com/starts-with/ec/)

With a single consonant + single vowel we would normally also have a short e sound. And apart from "ecarte"(from French), the only vowel that follows initial "ec" is "o" - and this is where the only variation I can see comes: in words starting "eco", which all belong to two word families based on "economy" and "ecology" (and related words with the prefix "eco" as in "ecowarrior").

So, as porsche has pointed out, the long "ee" pronunciation many of us use for these words is not down to a standard spelling rule (you can't really make a rule from what are basically two roots).

In dictionaries, the waters are rather muddy. Whereas Oxford Concise lists only /ɪ:/ ( the long ee sound) for "economy, economize , econometrics", it allows both long and short e for "economic, economical". For "ecology, ecologist, ecological" it allows both long and short e. But the /ɪ:/ (long ee) is always listed first. For those with the "eco" prefix "ecofreak, ecosystem, ecoterrorist", only the long /ɪ/ is given.

The American picture is rather different. The Free Dictionary is equally schizophrenic, giving /i/ (more like "ik"than "eek") only for "economy, economize, economist", and both long and short e for "economic" and "economical". They give /i/ for "ecology, ecologist" and long and short e for "ecological". But unlike Oxford, here the short e is listed first. With "ecosystems, ecoterrorism" both long and short e are given, but here long e is listed first.

So, although I agree with porsche that there are several variants - in standard dictionaries alone we can find /i:c/ (eek), /ic/ (ik), /ek/ (as in heck), I don't quite agree that "ee" doesn't get listed very much, although in American English it may not be so long - /i/ rather than /i:/. Where both are possible, recordings sometimes give one, sometimes the other.

One conclusion seems to be that these two dictionaries, one British, one American, list the nouns and verbs - "economy, economist, economize, ecology, ecologist" with "eek" or "ik" (AmE), and the adjectives and adverbs (and nouns based on them) are listed with both long and short e. Somebody who pronounces "economics" with a short e might well pronounce "economy" with a longer one.

And so what about Skeeter Lewis's suggestion about origins - ecology certainly entered the English language as oecology (1873 - from German) and you can find a few examples of oeconomy in eighteenth century books, although I'm not sure how "oe" was pronounced. But the economy family seemed to come to us via French, where they are definitely pronounced with a short 'e'.