you are a beautiful person, hidden
Grammar is beautiful.
That said, grammar can also be confusing and counter-intuitive. Consider the following:
Pronouns + "to be"
This one is hard to explain, so I'll just illustrate it with two examples:
- "Who is it?" Riku asked. "It's me!" Sora answered.
- "Who is it?" Riku asked. "It is I, Ansem, Seeker of Darkness!"
If you want to be a total fiend and grammar nazi, Ansem is technically correct. According to 'rules,' pronouns after the verb "to be" should be in the nominative case (I, he, she). This is why my mother answers the phone with "This is
she" when somebody asks "May I speak with the head of the household?" HOWEVER, regular English usage ignores this rule in most contexts, e.g. most of us answer the question "Who is it?" with "It's
me."
My suggestion is that, unless you have an awesome epithet after your name (e.g. "Seeker of Darkness") or you're continuing a sentence ("It was I who stole the cookies from the cookie jar!"), stick with the colloquial "It's me" or "That's him/her."
INTERESTINGLY (at least to me), the same rule applies to comparisons! Consider the sentence "Goofy is taller than Sora." Would you say:
- Goofy is taller than him.
or
Technically, the latter is correct, but most of us would say "taller than
him." To many native English speakers, "Goofy is taller than
he" just sounds too strange. (The justification used, that extended the sentence would be "Goofy is taller than
he is," also sounds off to my ears.) Again, the 'rules' conflict with actual usage. This all ties into prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, but I won't go into that because I've had enough fun for one post.
tl;dr I'm a grammar dork, and when in doubt, follow Orwell's sixth rule of writing in
Politics and the English Language: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous."