@Brus - My problem (one of them at least) is that neither 'I am me' nor 'I am myself' are natural English - nobody would ever say these, so I don't know why you'd want to use them to explain a grammatical point. 'This is me lying on the beach' or 'I'm really not feeling myself today' would give perfectly natural examples of 'me' and 'myself' as subject complements.

I'm afraid using artificial examples is one of my bugbears. There's one grammar website which, while explaining the passive, gives two examples - 'The dogs are loved by Suzanne' and 'The dogs are being loved by Suzanne', neither of which a native speaker would ever say. I write lots of grammar exercises myself, and make every effort to use natural examples. Otherwise it just confuses people.

Someone, like yourself, with a good knowledge of romance languages might find the term 'disjunctive pronoun' useful, but it doesn't seem to be a standard concept in English (except in explanations to French speakers, fro example). The entry for pronouns at Oxford Dictionaries online makes no mention of it, Collins has it but refers to French, and a linguistics book devoted to these very uses of pronouns has no reference to disjunctive pronouns at all. Those who use this term are transferring an idea from French and Italian, etc, which works for some things, but not others. And while the use of the disjunctive pronoun is mandatory in French, in English its use is frowned on by the traditionalists.

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/pronouns
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/disjunctive-pronoun?showCookiePolicy=true
http://books.google.pl/books?id=gjRV0gU1W3oC&pg=PA134

@Brus - Perhaps 'This is me (in the photo)' or 'This is us'. But 'I am me'? Sounds like something from 'I am the Walrus'. :)

Your disjunctive pronoun theory is interesting, although I've never seen this term used in any standard English grammar book. Those few sources that I've found which talk about disjunctive pronouns in English only use it for expressions like 'It's me', or solitary 'Me', which are certainly not accepted in those prescriptive grammars that insist on 'It is I'.

But even if we accept the idea of disjunctive pronouns for things like 'It's me', surely 'with me' and 'with us' are different. Everyone, prescriptivist and descriptivist alike, agrees that prepositions should always be followed by an objective form - 'Between you and me' - we don't need any special rule to explain that. It might be the case in French - 'Viens avec moi' - but English isn't French, and we don't have separate pronouns forms like 'moi' and 'lui'. We only have subjective, objective and possessive forms for pronouns.

Another thing worth noting is that when it is used, the subjective form is usually used without contractions - 'It is I', whereas the objective form is normally used with contractions, 'It's me', suggesting that the difference between the two is one of register - both are correct, but the former is rather formal. I might not use 'It is I', but I can't say it's incorrect. In French, on the other hand, 'C'est Je' is definitely not correct; you have no choice. This why 'I hae me doots' about extending this this idea of disjunctive pronouns to English.

@P - I think you just answered your own question. But as some people have suggested that the phone example doesn't happen that often, I hope you don't mind if I rephrase your question. If somebody accused your Standard-English-speaking pair A and B of doing something, would they be more likely to say, in informal spoken language, 'It wasn't us' or 'It wasn't we'? I'd go for 'us', myself.

@Skeeter Lewis (belatedly) - Well remembered (nearly) - "Beaver has the Audience and Admiration of his Neighbours from Six 'till within a Quarter of Eight, at which time he is interrupted by the Students of the House" - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/SV1/Spectator1.html

Searching for "a quarter of three" in Google Books brings up a few results, for example:

"At a quarter of three the expected party arrived" - History of Berkshire County, Massachusets

"It might want about a quarter of three o'clock when we got there" - Political Register 1768

"Il est trois heures moins un quart, it wants a quarter of three" - Boyer's French Dictionary 1839 - so a quarter of three definitely means a quarter to three.

The use of o'clock may have declined a lot in the twentieth century, but it seems to be having a bit of a revival in this one:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=o%27clock%3Aeng_us_2012%2Co%27clock%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

@suitjackets - I don't think you were the only one. :))

I was thinking in that Jobs quote, he could also have used another idiom - "They're two sides of the same coin".

@suitjackets - sorry, but I think you're over-analysing a very simple idiom, which just means "there's very little difference (as far as the speaker is concerned)":

"Which do you prefer, apples or oranges?" - "Same difference, I hate them both!"

Here's an example from Time Magazine from 2000, via Wiktionary:

"Apple as a company has been as much about design as about technology. Is it in danger of putting form ahead of function? Same difference, says Jobs."

In other words, to Jobs, form and function were indistinguishable.

There's a fairly level-headed discussion of "could care less" here - http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm

@providencejim - Yes, I nearly linked to that one myself; it's not often Mignon Fogarty gets in that much of a tizz about something. But there's no real reason why an intransitive verb can't turn into a transitive one; it's no doubt happened plenty of times before, although I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. After all, we change plenty of nouns into transitive verbs - "to access files", "to input data" etc. (I draw the line, however, at "We need to decision this"). But as you say, only time will tell

@wes - that only makes sense if you don't pronounce the H - do you really say 'orrific? And I'm sure you don't say 'igh school, unless you're a Cockney.

To give a British perspective, for us it's exactly as AnWulf has said - always "from", and the student always graduates from the school/university, never vice-versa. The idea of the school/university graduating the student seems only to exist in North American English.

Go back to the Anglish page? You must be joking! That page is the private domain of the Saxon Brotherhood, and woe betide any visitors who don't share their views. In my case, it's a case of thrice bitten, four times shy, I'm afraid.