Shakespeare! What a character!

That Shakespeare, eh? Very elusive, or was he just an alias for secret agent Marlowe anyway? Dr Johnson criticised him for making thousands of errors but can we be sure these so-called errors were not made by someone else? Not by Bacon, perhaps, but by one of the characters in the play? He certainly produced things of the "between you and I" type, but was this an error or was this the sort of thing that character would say? Come on you Shakespeare corpus analysts, there must be thousands of you out there!

Is is

Is is is (the double copula, including was was, the thing being is etc) now more or less standard, or at least unremarked? John Humphrys on the Today programme on BBCR4 had a bit of a campaign against it a few years ago but now most people around him seem to use it unnoticed - and no, it is not just a hesitation-type reduplication as several linguist say, perhaps because they do not want to be thought prescriptive. Did it begin as an imitation of influential Americans like George W. Bush (but not, I guess, his father)and John McEnroe, two early users?

Is is is

The thing being is, is that that we do tend to copy these famous people.

Former

It seems almost standard to say in the broadcast media things like 'He was a former Cabinet minister' or even 'You were a former TV producer' (Woman's Hour just now). Surely this is a kind of double past and it should be 'you are' (still are, you are still alive). Why does this kind of duplication (redundancy, I think is the term) happen? Is it related to what I call 'word inflation'? Extra syllables, extra words, extra tenses?

Oo er ee!

Er/ ee! We used to have a distinction between doer and doee, eg employer / employee. Now everything seems to take -ee, surely formerly the French past participle? So we have attendees at conferences but why not attenders? Seems a bit silly to me but I'm sure I'll be told that it's been happening for centuries and reminded of exceptions. But evacuees, for example, we're people who had BEEN evacuated. Is it another useful or meaningful distinction that is being lost?

Bolder

It used to be that only giants(or Americans) could throw rocks but now we're doing it here too. Progress : we're getting bigger and boulder.

What comes next?

Firstly,secondly and thirdly seems to have given way to 'first of all, second of all [and on occasion]third of all', which smacks of word inflation. I wonder why people want to increase speech output - enough already. Do they think it sounds more important? Perhaps I'll ask the experts at Guardian style!