Reply #10: Sorry, but for the grammar purists among us,

[athena]

such a change is simply not acceptable. We were just as outraged when the American Physical Society considered changing its name to "The American Physics Society." The latter is not wrong, but the former is more traditional and sounds better.

From http://blogs.csmonitor.com/verbal_energy/2005/01/index.... :

I think we're losing our inflections – the special endings we use to distinguish between adjectives and nouns, for instance. There's a tendency to modify a noun with another noun rather than an adjective. Some may speak of "the Ukraine election" rather than "the Ukrainian election" or "the election in Ukraine," for instance. It's "the Iraq war" rather than the Iraqi war, to give another example. (Compare the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. If it were being fought today, we might be calling it the France-Prussia War.) Against this backdrop, "the Democrat Party" arguably sounds less like a McCarthyesque slur, although it still doesn't pass muster at professionally edited publications.

I also get annoyed when people say "The thing is is that" or misuse the expression, "to beg the question."