Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.

The nuns in the 1965 movie 'The Sound of Music' are singing about Maria, who is difficult to deal with: How do you solve a problem like Maria? Being non-native (and only seeing a still frame of the scene) I thought it meant 'How does Maria solve problems?'. Somewhat similar to 'What would Jesus do?'. Can 'solve a problem like [someone]' also be understood in this way? Edits: I am aware of the context. It would be silly to think the singing nuns hold up Maria (Julie Andrews) as a role model. I checked my Quirk/Greenbaum grammar but have trouble finding anything conclusive concerning this usage of [like] and its validity. I do have to admit, that I didn't look very thoroughly. I am a bit like Maria, in this way.
You're right: 'How do you solve a problem like Maria?' is syntactically ambiguous. The phrase 'like Maria' can modify either a preceding noun phrase ('a problem') or a preceding verb phrase ('solve a problem'). Both of these usages are recognized as valid by traditional prescriptive grammars (Fowler 1926 describes 'He talks like an expert' as an 'unexceptionable' usage of like, where 'like is equivalent to a prepositional adverb'p. 325 in republished 2009 edition). Prescriptive grammars have traditionally condemned a third use of like, the use 'as a conjunction' where it is followed by a clause (e.g. 'like Maria does') rather than by a noun phrase. However, as the comments point out, that construction would allow you to express 'How do you solve problems the way that Maria solves problems' without ambiguity. Many modern linguists analyze like as a preposition when it takes a bare noun phrase like 'Maria' as its complement (although like is not always a preposition, and even when it is, it doesn't always behave exactly the same way as other prepositions). The same kind of ambiguity is seen with many prepositional phrases, as illustrated by the joke 'One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know,' which relies on this ambiguity. You can see further examples and discussion in the answers to Does 'I am eating vegan cheese in my underpants' really imply that the vegan cheese is inside my underpants? (the 'shot an elephant in my pajamas' joke is mentioned in JoeTaxpayer's answer there).

Is there a word to describe an object that excels in form and function? I am trying to avoid very general words like great, superb or excellent.
Could it be described as an elegant solution or an engineering marvel?

Possible Duplicate: When do I use 'I' instead of 'me?' A friend of mine asked me for advice about an e-mail he was writing. There was a sentence like this: I and my partners we are interested in investing in your product. I figured it was wrong, so I suggested: I and my partners are interested in investing in your product. This looks grammatical to me but sounds strange. Also, I have seen a lot of people writing this: Me and my partners we are interested in investing in your product. which I believe is not grammatical. So, which one of the options above is correct? Also, what would be a better choice of words?.

'I and someone are interested' is grammatically correct. It is the convention in English that when you list several people including yourself, you put yourself last, so you really should say 'Someone and I are interested.' 'Someone and I' is the subject of the sentence, so you should use the subjective case 'I' rather than the objective 'me'. 'Someone and I' clearly means two people, so you should use 'are' and not 'is'. If it was 'Someone or I ...' then you would use 'is', because only one person is interested, either 'someone' or 'I'. It is not uncommon to hear people say 'Me and someone are ...', but this is wrong because it's the wrong case. When an educated person hears 'Me and Billy is going to the ball game', he immediately thinks this is either a child or a very uneducated person speaking. 'I and someone we ...' is incorrect because it is redundant. 'We' is simply another way of saying 'I and someone'. It adds no new information to the sentence, and so there is no reason to include it. You can't just string together alternative ways of expressing the same idea: If you really need it for clarity or emphasis, you have to surround it with some additional words, like a 'that is', or sometimes just punctuation that show its purpose in the sentence. You could say, 'We, that is, Bob and I, are interested ...' All that said, 'I and someone' or 'Someone and I' sounds strange to me, and I suspect most English speakers, because it is an unusual use of the word 'someone'. When 'someone' is used in a list with identifiers of other people, we usually say 'someone else'. Like, 'Bob and someone else are interested ...' rather than 'Bob and someone are interested ...' (I have no idea why this is so; it's just the convention.) 'Someone' without 'else' is normally only used when it's the only person: 'Someone is interesteed ...'