John McWhorter has a new book out. [Why English Won’t - and Can’t- Sit Still (Like, Literally)](Words on the Move: Why English Won’t - and Can’t - Sit Still (Like, Literally)). I’ve always enjoyed his books, and I think this one will shed some light on the issue. Note that “literally” has been used to mean “really” since the 1700s. It’s not an abomination introduced by Millenials after all!!
Oh, it was big among Gen Xers, too. I never connected the word with Millennials, but rather my generation, even though I know it’s been used as an intensifier for far longer. Hell, I even heard it used as such yesterday on NPR. Oh, the humanity! 
The nerve! The absolute nerve!
(as Juror No. 3 would say)
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Looks interesting – bad link, though – here’s a link to Amazon. It’s not available until tomorrow (the 6th).
I was of course curious to see what sorts of positions McWhorter has taken on the issues brought up in this discussion, and I’ve come up with two interesting ones.
McWhorter is the guy who made the following analysis in Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English. He says that personal pronouns like “I” and “me” in English have only the subject and the object form, unlike Latin with its numerous case forms, and he calls the object case the “oblique” form. His contention is that a construction like “Billy and me went to the store” is actually correct because (unlike Latin) English provides for only a narrow use of the subject form but a broad use of the oblique form, citing examples of what would happen if we forced English to the Latin rules: the obvious answer to “Who made this?” is properly “me”, not “I”, and likewise if it was someone else, the answer would be “him” and not “he”, “them” and not “they”. (It’s even the same in French: “Qui I’afait? Moi!”) He cites the additional systematic rule that the oblique form is allowed to express a subject in any conjunction used in the subject case, hence “Billy and me went to the store”.
Now I find two conclusions from this to be quite interesting. The first is that here we have yet a third linguist (after Pullum and Pinker) who asserts the correctness of the object case pronoun in a subject-case conjunction, yet his rationale is yet again completely different. I’m not saying any of them are wrong, I’m just saying: three linguists, three different explanations. And I frankly doubt that any of them are manifestations of an unconscious language sense.
McWhorter also seems to differ from the other two on the matter of hypercorrection introducing the subject-case “I”. Having made the case for “Billy and me”, he goes on to lament that “the tragedy of this hopeless little nonrule is that it is so counterintuitive that most of us misapply it”. “What usually sticks in our minds,” he goes on to say, "is a vague sense that “‘I’ should be used after ‘and’, and this leads to the common phrase between you and I … The problem here is that ‘I’ is not a subject in this case, and thus this is wrong according to the prescriptive rule – and yet as we have seen, neither is it real English.”
McWhorter was also cited here with respect to an older book, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care:
He knows a great deal about language, particularly in the United States. And he finds it gravely diseased.
In the end, his conclusion is grim: Since language is the vehicle of culture, this creeping carnage foreshadows a fatal stagnation of the intellectual culture of the United States.
Why? Because of the deterioration of precision, discipline and formality of the written word, which is fast being conquered by oral expression. “Spoken language” he writes, “is best suited to harboring easily processible chunks of information, broad lines, and emotion. To the extent that our public discourse leans ever more toward this pole, the implications for the prospect of an informed citizenry are dire … Americans after the 1960s have lived in a country with less pride in its language that any other society in recorded history.”
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2003-10-12/entertainment/0310100222_1_english-language-mcwhorter-culture
Further on the McWhorter book (thanks for mentioning it, John, it looks like an interesting read, I’ll probably buy it later) there’s a rather substantial preview available that I looked at and the author mentions the “I/me” matter briefly in an introductory chapter.
I don’t know if he goes into any more detail about it later as it’s primarily a book about words rather than about grammar, but the view he expressed was very similar to his earlier one I mentioned just above. McWhorter in fact repeated that exact same “Billy and me” example used as a subjective conjunction, and considers it a “settled matter” that this is a grammatical variant. Meanwhile the “I” in the hypercorrection cases he seems to feel we’ll be arguing about forever.
Unfortunately the example he uses when he says that is “It is I”. On this, I’m now on the descriptivists’ side, and would posit that “it’s me” is grammatical for two reasons: the extremely common, well entrenched usage, and secondly, McWhorter’s own argument about the ability of the ubiquitous pronoun “me” to take on the subjective case in certain situations. I might even go so far as to acknowledge that the second rule might be considered self-evidently derived from the first (the rallying cry of descriptivists everywhere!) but only because this is an extreme case.
But IMHO “you and I” and the like as an objective conjunction is still a prime example of a silly hypercorrection that should be stamped out with a hammer.