I think the point of the exercise was to prove to us that we don't know everything
and, perhaps more important, to prove that grammarians are sometimes idiots who make up nonsensical rules for non-situations. However, being interested in this sort of thing, I at least wanted to know what the supposed rule was before I made my own decisions about how to use the language.
Whomever. Because it sounds better. If you want to get so picky, then avoid the ambigious case altogether by saying "The person/actor/entity". But in a more general sense, the entire construction "Whomever we appoint" is the subject, since "whoever" acting as the subject by itself would have an entirely different meaning. "Whomever we appoint" as a phrase does not take a separate objective and subjective case, nor does it need to since it is a fairly precise noun.
You can say whatever you like, but as long as the bigwigs disagree with you (and me), you're still wrong. In a case like this, I expect no one would notice or care if
whomever slipped into print. About three picky grammarians might frown, but that's it. Did you read Jon Boy's links?
"What this country needs..." has no reason to be phrased that way, and matches a plural to a singular. "This country needs..." would be more concise and more correct.
Sure, but people say things like this all the time. Saying it's awkward doesn't mean nobody will say it, and when they do, what then?
"More important/importantly" is also incorrect, no matter which you use.
More important is not incorrect. I used it in my first paragraph, and it's just fine there. Where are you getting that it's incorrect? You just don't like it?
"Let's" is a contraction of "let us", and renders the "you and I/me" redundent and ungrammatical.
This one's archaic and British, which is why it sounds stupid to us modern Americans. Apparently some grammarian wrote a stunning essay on why it should be
you and I instead of
you and me, but I'll have to read it and find it pretty stunning before I agree. The original sentence is the first line of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Odd as it is, it's a real sentence used by a real person.
"The" is not a noun.
Typo. My bad; I was typing fast. It should be
They.
A better way to phrase 8 (and one which clears things up a bit) would be, "I didn't see him, even if he was there." True, it is the "even" which takes the syntactic burden of clearing things up, but the order of "I didn't see him" and "he was there" matters in communicating which is more important.
The question is testing whether the sentence is in the subjunctive or the indicative mood. Your reordering makes it a bit easier to decide on indicative, but someone might still be fooled into thinking it should be "I didn't see him, even if he were there."
The terms "will" and "shall" have slightly different meanings, but in a purely grammatical sense neither is correct or incorrect as used here. Using "shall" merely allows that it is only intended that something happen, whereas "will" indicates that it is certain to occur. If I say, "you will die..." it means something quite different from, "you shall die...".
Yeah, and
shall is pretty much dying in American usage. When was the last time someone you know used
shall? I thought this question was out of date and irrelevant to today's writers and editors.
Likewise, "I feel bad" and "I feel badly" would mean entirely different things, if either were correct at all. One happens to be an accepted usage, the other is not, but neither is really correct, and syntactically they wouldn't mean the same thing anyway.
I can't imagine feeling badly. Of all the senses to go, that seems the least likely, and I would never say, "I see badly." I would say, "I can't see very well." The only possible meaning is "I feel sorry" or something similar to it, and so
bad is the only possible choice there.
But simply being an accepted usage doesn't render a construction grammatical, it just means that most people will exempt that usage from the rules of grammer.
I honestly don't know what you mean here. Could you elaborate?