Technically, "It is I." is correct. However, it's so rarely used that it sounds stilted, pedantic and unnatural. Same with "Not I."

"It's me" is so overwhelmingly used that from a descriptive or functional standpoint, it's the preferred way.

In formal writing I would try to avoid the entire issue and find some other way of expressing the idea.

The first is in the simple past tense ("mentioned" is a past tense verb); the second is in the present perfect tense ("mentioned" is a past participle).

Though the two tenses have different uses, their uses sometimes overlap. This is one of those situations where both can be used - talking about an event in the recent past.

So they are both correct.

"tidal wave" is a misnomer - tsunamis have nothing to do with tides.

Also, English phonotactics doesn't allow a "ts" sound at the beginning of a syllable, whereas Japanese does. When the word was adopted into English, the initial "t" was dropped to fit English phonology. This is the same reason we don't pronounce the "p" in psychology: English syllables can't start with "ps".

I heard that "chink" derived from the Ching Dynasty name for China: "Ta Ching Kuo" (Great Kingdom of the Ching). But Westerners, when they heard it, focused in the "Ching K-" segment, and used it as a slur.

This would be similar to the theory of "gook" coming from the Korean word "Miguk" meaning "America". During the Korean War, American soldiers would hear the locals saying "me gook" repeatedly, and adopted "gook" as a slur.

Don't know how much truth there is in either theory...

The Oxford Comma (as a serial comma before the "and" in a list is known) is optional. It's all a matter of what makes the meaning least ambiguous and most aethetically pleasing.

I often use the Oxford Comma:

"Yesterday I ate apples, bananas, and cherries."

But in the following sentence I would generally drop it because doing so seems to fuse "cherries" more closely to "bananas", thereby making the division in the sentence by the second "and" stronger:

"Yesterday I ate apples, bananas and cherries, and then I bought some oranges."

Both are grammatical, but it's more natural to say "...who I was".

Rhyming (in English) takes place when everything starting from the nucleus (i.e. the vowel) of the last STRESSED syllable onward is identical.

"finger" & "linger" rhyme because they both contain an identical "inger".

In "people" and "purple", the "eeple" and "erple" parts are different.

"people" rhymes with "steeple"

"purple" rhymes with "syr'p'll" (syrup will) :)

The main problem with "s/he" is this: how the hell is it pronounced?

This sounds like one of my own pet peeves: the "All A are not B" construction. It's ambiguous and should be avoided.

> "Onto" is a preposition, you only use "on to"
> if one of the words is not a preposition i.e.
> part of a predicate/infinitive.

What about "I plan to continue on to graduate school"?