It is a Latin plural, English has stopped treating it as one, and the only genuinely wrong answer is changing your mind halfway through a document.

There is a rule, it takes ten seconds to apply, and there are three situations where following it will make you sound worse.

Chaucer used it. Shakespeare used it. The objection arrived in the eighteenth century, and the alternatives have all failed.

Nice meant foolish. Awful meant awe-inspiring. Decimate meant to kill one in ten. Some of these reversals are finished and some are happening now.

Dickens did it. So did Joyce, Twain and Fitzgerald. The complaint is younger than the usage it complains about.

It is in the dictionary. That does not settle the argument, and understanding why is more useful than knowing which side you are on.

“I didn’t see nothing” is not bad mathematics. It is a grammatical feature of many English dialects, and once it was standard everywhere.

Roughly one sentence in ten in published English begins with a conjunction. The prohibition was a teaching shortcut that outlived its purpose.

The rule comes from a poet in 1672 who thought English should sound more like Latin. Nobody has been able to make it work since.

It sounds more careful than “between you and me”, which is exactly why it is wrong. This is what a hypercorrection is and how to spot your own.