Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve noticed more and more people misusing the first person nominative case, for example, “between you and I.” What I suspect has happened is that folks have become so fearful of using “me” incorrectly (such as in “me and Bubba are gonna go buy ammo down at the Walmart”) and thereby appearing uneducated, that they overuse “I”. It’s gotten so bad that you hear it on news programs and talk shows, even the otherwise intelligent ones. I’m pretty sensitive about this issue since Sister Mary Ruler thoroughly instilled the rules of grammar in me as a child.
As far as I can tell, nobody else seems alarmed about this problem, although my wife will say “oh yeah” when I point it out to her. Numerous web searches have turned up nothing. Can anyone shed some light on this grammar trend and the lack of commentary on it? I’m sure your standards are high enough to be bothered by this as well.
I think you nailed it. We, as kids, were corrected when we said, “Me and Jim went down to the creek.” We were scolded, and told “Jim and I went down to the creek.” So we became gun-shy, and use “I” even when it’s wrong.
I find the easiest way to see which word is right is to leave Jim out of the equation altogether. “Marge gave a gift to Jim and…[me/I]?” Tell Jim to take a hike. “Marge gave a gift to me” is obviously correct, whereas “Marge gave a gift to I” sounds stupid.
Drives me nuts. Also, people who aren’t sure whether to use “I” or “me,” so they say “myself” non-reflexively, ie, “Someone like myself”; “Come with Joe and myself.” Even Sheldon Cooper does this. “Myself” is for reflexive verbs, period.
Bugs the shit out of me. But, it goes both ways. You will often hear “he isn’t any better than me” or similar construction on TV. Makes me wonder what is happening to the language.
My grandfather was an English professor, meaning my father was the son of an English professor. While I was never physically assaulted for grammar misuse, I was reminded every time I misspoke. I couldn’t even get away with “I saw this man at the store…” without being told, not only that I was wrong, but why.
So, when I see, say, Sheldon or Leonard on the “Big Bang Theory” say “It’s not like Stephen Hawking is smarter than me, he just has a better publicist”, it makes me hurt.
I actually saw an email at work today that correctly used “contact blah blah or me for information.” It warmed my heart. Even at work, almost 100% of the time people get this wrong.
And the fucking “myself” thing drives me absolutely batty. Yes, “me” apparently is a word that shan’t be used in formal messages.
I sometimes correct people if I know them well enough. I corrected my manager (about xxx or I) about 4 months ago. He said he had to look it up on Google to affirm my correction. Thankfully I don’t report to him anymore.
This isn’t remotely limited to the past decade. This has been going on for a long time, and I’m not sure what the trend is. I just ran on Google Ngram the prepositional phrases using “between”, “for”, “to”, “with”, “besides” and “on” as the prepositions.
But when the incorrect word is used, it doesn’t further communication, but hampers it. I’ve been hearing this type of thing my entire life, and that’s a long, long time. It seems to annoy me more the older I get, because everything annoys me more now.
I’ve always assumed that “and I” is now often used as the object by the same mechanism as the OP suggests. But I think the “Me and…” as the subject is old-established - I can think of a couple of old folk-songs that use it (“Loch Lomond”, “Trotting to the Fair”, for example).
I’m wondering if perhaps it’s old enough to have been something carried over from Celtic predecessor languages? A quick Google suggests that Welsh and both Scottish and Irish Gaelic make no distinction between object and subject forms. It’s easy to see how they could have become markers of “low” origins as first Anglo-Saxons and then Normans became the upper crust, and, much later, prescriptivism and standardisation would have made them signs of lower-class lack of education.
FWIW, I once heard someone recall an overheard remark, decades ago, in the English countryside, from a teenage girl to her friend: “Why do her wave at we? Us don’t know she!”. Makes perfect sense to me.
There are still some times when it is really unclear whether you should use I or me, and the easiest thing to do is to default to I. The problem is that most people default to I 70% of the time, even when they’re wrong.
You mean “…every apple that fell down on a Wednesday”, right?
There’s actually a serious point here. Some grammar rules are indeed pedantic and should be ignored, but the vast majority actually do serve the purpose of clarity to various degrees. The fact that a reader can plausibly guess what the writer means doesn’t ipso facto make the usage correct.
Take the above example. “Which” is wrong because the adjectival phrase “fell down on a Wednesday” is a restrictive clause that refers only to a certain group of apples. Here’s an example of how real ambiguity can be introduced:
a) The cars that were well cared for were in good condition after ten years.
b) The cars, which were well cared for, were in good condition after ten years.
The sentences mean completely different things, and it’s not just the commas that distinguish them, it’s “that” vs. “which”. The first describes a subset of cars that were well cared for among a larger group that were not. The second references an unrestricted clause: all the cars were in good condition, all had been well cared for.
Change or ambiguity of meaning is less obvious and less egregious when one switches “I” and “me”, but it’s confusing when a subjective personal pronoun is used as the object of a verb or an objective pronoun is used as a subject. Using the correct form simply reinforces clarity of subject vs. object.
Of course not. My variety of English doesn’t work like that.
The fact is, except in cases of error (that is, when a speaker violates a rule they previously followed in the same context (to be pedantic, while speaking in the same register)), native speakers don’t speak “ungrammatically”; they don’t speak according to the prestige dialect, but that’s no flaw, and it doesn’t impede communication among people who share the same dialect as the speaker.
Empirically incorrect. You just saw how I do not follow that rule, and how trying to impose it on my speech fails to capture it.
Also the prosody, which humans capture using commas, which is why the commas are there in the first place. Spoken language is primary; written, secondary.
This sounds all nice and formal, and I’m certain it’s correct for whatever subset of the recognized prestige dialect you learned, but attempting to say my speech is incorrect for not following it is akin to saying an electron is incorrect for not behaving like a tau neutrino.
