I’m smack in the middle of a dispute with someone regarding what seems to be a pretty simple grammar problem.
He wrote something like, “Sue and I and at Yellowstone.”
I looked at this, remembered my handy grammar rule of thumb (remove the other person and check if it makes sense), and commented that he was wrong. My reasoning is: you would not say, “I at Yellowstone.” You would say, “Me at Yellowstone.”
He argued that it is “I” because “Sue and I” are the subject, not the object. This makes sense, but it goes against my public school education. Say it ain’t so!
Has my grammar rule of thumb taught me wrong? If so, I don’t know what to do with myself! :eek:
I agree. Part of the problem is that the caption as it stands isn’t really a sentence. If the sentence is actually “Sue and I ARE at Yellowstone [in this picture]”, with the “are” dropped, then it’s “I” because the alternative is “I am”. If, however, it’s really “Here are Sue and I at Yellowstone”, it should be “me” (Here is me at Yellowstone).
I agree. “Sue and __ at Yellowstone” is part of an implied sentence. Not “Sue and I are at Yellowstone,” but “Here’s a picture of Sue and me at Yellowstone.”
As such, I’d go with “me.”
But since it’s not a complete sentence, it’s a judgment call.
This is how most people would say it, but I don’t think that you’d find anything in a grammar book to support this. “me” is the objective form of the first person singular pronoun, but there’s nothing taking an object here.
I think that because the caption isn’t even a complete sentence to begin with, you’re pretty much out of luck for finding the textbook proper grammar for it.
Yes, I think lissener put it better than I did. “Here is [a picture of] me [and Sue] at Yellowstone” is an actual sentence, though to be fair to myself, my non-sentence was a replacement in kind.
Since he wrote “Sue and I at Yellowstone,” is he assuming that he is the only one who will be looking at the photo in years to come? If not, he should have put “Sue and Gary” at Yellowstone. Inconsiderate jerk.
The case could be made – and I would say it’s a very strong case – that captions and labels are implicitly in the nominative case. If you want extrapolate it into a sentence, the sentence would be simply “This is Fred/a butterfly/the Grand Canyon/whatever,” and as predicate nouns governed by the verb “to be,” they would be nominative. To make the extrapolation “This is a picture of …” strikes me as going out of one’s way to use the objective case. I really don’t believe that’s how people normally think about it.
It’s a good rule of thumb, but it does depend on using correct grammar with the one person. While we more often than not use “me” when “I” is called for (e.g. “It’s me” technically should be “It’s I”), and thus that’s what we “would” say, under current rules of grammar it’s wrong.
No, it should be “Here I am at Yellowstone” (= “Here am I at …”). Think about this – surely you don’t believe that “here is me” is correct and “here I am” is incorrect?
If I read you correctly, you’re endorsing sentences of the variety “It is I” (as, for instance, when knocking on a door.)
Not correct. The use of the nominative as a compliment for “to be” is not a feature of English at all; it’s an artificial “rule” invented by analogy to Latin (where both the subject and the compliment do indeed have to be in the same case.) That’s the same sort of silliness that tells us we can’t split infinitives in English (because they’re a single word in Latin.)
“It is I” and similar sentences are hypercorrections, used by people in the mistaken belief that English by rights ought to mimic Latin grammar. They have never existed as a natural part of English grammar, and while the sentence “It is I” and a few others are learned by rote by those wishing to put on a show of their education, even educated speakers rarely use the nominative consistently, mostly only using it in the specific rote formulas they’ve memorized. (In contrast to something like “whom”, which many older and well-educated English speakers do use consistently, as it was originally generated by a distinction native to English.)
Totally agree. I’ve looked at old family photos and been driven nuts by cryptic info scrawled on the back: “at the old house,” “1939?”, “Toots”, “the cousins”…
If you do caption a photo, please be specific, if only for the putative benefit of future generations!
