Reaching into the mail bag, I find that one reader wants to know "why is everyone afraid to use the objective 'me?'"

To be honest, not only do I not think everyone is afraid to say "me," I think hardly anyone is. In fact, there are some quarters where about all you hear is "me, me, me." There's some chance that my hearing is failing and they're really singing "mi, mi, mi," having forgotten the other seven notes of the major scale, but I don't think so. The "me, me, me" folks look more like voters than a chorus.

But I'm dodging the question, which is attached to a copy of a recent column where I used the subjective "my wife and I," where the objective "my wife and me" would have been appropriate. Fear had nothing to do with it. Carelessness had everything to do with it. Plus, as the following note from Tom McAvoy reminds me, I'm getting old.

How could Andy stand it?

"Marcus, old man, "Don't you love it when college-age men address one another that way? 'Old man?' I watch an unhealthy number of movies from the '20s, '30s and '40s on TCM and it was very popular back then - wonder why it fell out of favor? My guess is some (maybe a lot) guys our age or older woke up with the normal aches and pains that typify these stages of aging and heard a couple of wet-behind-the-ears smooth-faced young whippersnappers (or scalawags, pick one...) in dinner jackets addressing one another as 'old man' and golfed them."

Tom's observation about a salutation that sounded great when Cary Grant used it led to this observation about "The old 'Andy Griffith Show' - maybe one of the most unrealistic programs of all time. On a daily basis he dealt with Barney, Gomer, Goober, Floyd, Warren, Otis... yet never once did you see him turn to Helen Crump and mutter, 'man, what an (deleted).' All those years of relentless aggravation and the worst Andy came up with was 'you beat everything, you know that?' What was in Mayberry's water? They were all mental defectives, but to a soul they were all mellow."

And if you've wondered about the history of the now-ubiquitous @ sign, Tom passes along this research:

"The first time it was coopted that I could find was in 1972 when a computer techie named Ray Tomlinson employed it in sending the first e-mail to indicate the recipient's location.

"But Webopedia states that long before its appearance on typewriter keyboards it's possible that Latin scribes of the 6th or 7th centuries adapted it from the Latin word 'ad,' meaning at, to or toward. To economize on the number of pen strokes they would use created the ligature, or combination of two or more letters simply by exaggerating the upstroke of the letter 'd' then curving it left over the 'a.'

"The general knowledge I have always gone by is that @ originates (and was confined to) as a mercantile term dating back seven or eight centuries to indicate a measure of quantity 'at the price of' as would appear on a billing, as in 100 nails @ 2 cents each, total $2.

"While it has come to be called the 'at sign' in our language, other tongues would seem to be more creative.

"For example, in what is an entertaining word all its own, the Dutch call @ the 'apestaart,' which translates to monkey's tail.' The Germans... have two terms for this symbol; one is 'affenschwanz,' meaning monkey's tail, or 'klammeraffe' - hanging monkey. Just about all other languages name this symbol after the tail of one animal or another, but I like the distinction and basic simplicity of the Italians. They merely call it a 'commercial,' or 'business a.'"

Another mea culpa

As I began with an admission of a misuse of the subjective, I'll end with an answer to the question raised by a caller who wanted to know "who wrote the headline on Wednesday's editorial." I did. It said "State GOP needs to keep what it's got," and I agree with the caller that it would have been more direct and pleasant to the ear as "State GOP needs to keep what it has."

MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.