A few thoughts about words.

Three times today, in three different contexts, I encountered the word "spangle" (or "spangling" or "spangled"). Isn't it a great word? Spangle.

The first occasion was in a book review by Meghan O'Rourke.
Since those days much has changed; you can’t go out to the Fort Greene Greenmarket on Saturday without running into a spangle of fiction writers.

The second occasion was in the book I'm reading for my book group meeting (Gold by Chris Cleave):  
The day of her birthday was hot. ...The wheat was on the turn but it was still fresh and green, with the poppies and the cornflowers spangling it.

I like the way the word sounds in both those instances, although the first use -- "spangle" as a collective noun -- seems to deviate a lot from all the definitions I can find for the word.

And of course we all know "spangled" from the National Anthem, as in star-spangled banner. My third encounter with a spangly word today was during the HBO Veterans Day TV thing. Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and the Zac Brown Band doing "Fortunate Son" by John Fogerty.

Yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord

Interesting song choice for a Veterans Day event. They were great.

The following sentence, also from the novel Gold, made me grind my teeth: 

Me and Zoe have to see Tom ....

I know it's just a novel, but I hear that kind of sentence ...."Me and Bob are going to ...." far, far too often. I'm flexible, I'm willing to change with the times. But I am not, nor will I ever be, ready to accept "me" as the subject of a sentence. Me won't!!

Finally, I've given up caring about the use of "between you and I." I think even grammarians have given up. There's an entire Wikipedia entry on the subject, including this over-the-top sentence:

In its treatment of "coordinate nominatives" used where the accusative (oblique) case would be used in non-coordinate constructions, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language differentiates different levels of acceptance, depending on the pronouns used and their position in the coordinate construction. Thus, a construction like "without you or I knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English."