Yeah, I went around the hamster wheel on that one. It's one of those situations where nothing really scans right... and as a grammatical descriptivist, the wronger it scans, the wronger it probably is. So I guessed.

Language dork digression:

I blame a bunch of Latin-worshippers in the 18th Century for screwing up the rules, (improperly so-called,) of English grammar. They were wrong in multiple directions. First, English is a Germanic-branch Indo-European langauge, not an Italic-branch one, so trying to impose the structure of one onto the other is likely to end badly. Second, most of what English took from Norman French was vocabulary, not grammar. Third, and most importantly, among Indo-European languages, English is really, really weird. We have a radically simplified grammar: no gender, no case, SVO word order. (Except for some left-over Celtic oddities like "meaningless do.") Our vocabulary is from everywhere. And English spelling is pathological. (Although historically interesting, because the weird corners of it tend to preserve useful information about the history of the words.)

The number one rule of English grammar is this: If Ms. Grundy taught it to you in the 3rd grade, it's likely to be wrong. This is not her fault... many of the rules she was taught to teach you are not rules, and never have been. ("Thou shalt never split thine infinitives" is my favorite example of this.) And the interesting rules, like adjective order, are so automatic that most people don't even know that they're rules.

--Shannon

* I'm also a "functional punctuator", as demonstrated by damned near everything I write.