I had a sergeant who thought “penultimate” meant “better than ultimate.” No one else in the company seemed to have heard the word before. But I started to get a giggle fit in formation when we were told we were going to be the “Penultimate company at the firing range that day at qualifications.” I had survived the time he said the US had the “Penultimate fight force in the world,” but somehow qualifications day just got me in the gut. Maybe because it was actually a pretty reasonable goal for that particular company.
“Something funny Hammer [my name at the time]?”
Biting lip “No, Sergeant. Just looking forward to getting on the range.”
I had a related topic come up w guests at dinner last night.
The 40-something woman is from South America and was raised with both Spanish & German as her in-home languages. English was added later at school. She’s well-educated, well read, etc. She’s lived in the USA about 15 years now and speaks English with a good vocabulary, distinct Latina accent, although some Spanish grammar leaks into her English sentences.
We were discussing word order in clauses like “somebody and me” or “Sue, Jane, and me” versus “me and somebody” or “Me, Jane, and Sue”. I.e a clause with references to one or more people or groups of people and also including “I” or “me” to refer to the speaker of the clause. This is not about the choice of “I” vs. “me”, but rather their placement in the sequence.
Her contention was that in Spanish at least, the “me and somebody” construction was ungrammatical; the self-referent must always come last. And she asserts that in English she hears the I/me-first order more and more these days, which is grating. I countered that as 60-something I was taught, “me and somebody” isn’t so much ungrammatical as it’s impolite. It’s a construction used by oafs, not dummies. But yes, now that you mention it, using I/me-first construction does seem to be increasing.
There was no resolution but the topic may interest you folks too.
So 3 questions:
Is “I/me-first” construction ungrammatical in English? Is it impolite? Both / Neither?
Is “I/me-first” construction ungrammatical in Spanish? Is it impolite? Both / Neither?
Is its use growing? Is this good / bad / indifferent?
“I and…” sounds really wrong. “Susie and I went to the movies”, not “I and Susie”
“me and …” sounds slightly inapt.
“He gave a ride to me and Jim” is only fractionally less smooth than “He gave a ride to Jim and me”
The “I and Susie went to the movies” sounds so wrong, I’d probably assume that the person saying it was not a native speaker. The other one just forgot Jim for the moment, and had to add his name at the end.
One language feature that English (along with many other languages) lacks that I sometimes wish it had is more that one form of “we”. There are times when I want “we” to mean “you and us” and other times I want to say “he/she/them and I", but precise clarity is just too much effort. I understand that there are languages that have this distinction. I wish ours did.
@Andy_L. Good inputs on the sequencing. As I said, this wasn’t about the choice of I vs me; for discussion’s sake we can assume the speaker picks that one correctly.
I’m failing to understand the intended distinction between your two examples. Color me blinkered.
Unless perhaps you’re imagining e.g. 2 couples = 4 people talking and you want to distinguish between one of them joining your couple to make a threesome versus one of you joining their couple to make a threesome. And you want words for the two different kinds of threesomes. I could imagine a use case for that distinction, but it wouldn’t be common.
The one I wish current English had was second person you-singular vs second person you-plural. “Y’all” is slowly growing into the role for you-plural, but I’m not a fan. Harrumph!
Does that include you or not? Is it an implied invitation or letting you know that a bunch of people along with me are going to the beach while you are expected to stay here? In many cases, context and assumptions make it obvious, but there are times when I wish I had a short form that made it clear.
It can get even more complex than that. “We” can potentially mean “me and you,” “me and you and this other person,” “me and this other person, but not you,” or “me and this whole bunch of other people (possibly including you, possibly not).”
According to John McWhorter in an episode of Lexison Valley, there are some languages that explicitly make some or all of those distinctions.
“I” first strikes me as stilted and awkward. “Me” first only sounds self-important to the point of being unseemly (as though the inclusion of the other person/s is an afterthought).
I don’t have any knowledge of Spanish grammar, so I’ma pass.
I don’t notice an increase in frequency for “I/me first” (with the assumption of “correct” usage), and frankly, I expect to remain indifferent to it at least until I CAN count on the correct usage.
Yeah, “I and Susie” sounds odd. In my dialect, “me and Susie” would be the more natural construction, although following the “rules” of English grammar, the former should be correct and the latter incorrect (you want subjective case there.)
There’s perfectly good reasons to put yourself as the first subject in a multi subject sentence (emphasis, parallelism), so the idea that you have to put yourself later in the subject is silly, IMHO. Language should be (and is) more flexible than that.
Sometimes you want to emphasize yourself in a sentence. “Did your brother and Susie go to the movies? No. Me and Susie went to the movies!” There’s plenty of good reasons to put yourself first in a sentence and de-emphasize the secondary subject. Or when you’re telling a story about yourself, but want to include secondary characters to establish a narrative. Like, seriously, “self-importan to the point of being unseemly”? Sometimes, you just want to tell a story about yourself or what you were doing and are just including the secondary characters to establish you were in a group, but their presence is only tangential to the story.
Like I said, in my dialect “Me and Susie” would be the way to say it if you wanted to emphasize yourself in the subject position. “Me don’t like Susie,” though, would be considered ungrammatical.
I cannot argue about any dialect, but “me” is ungrammatical because the pronoun is in the wrong case, at least the way I understand the sentence. The normal word order is “Susie and I”. When you deviate from the normal word order, you create a special emphasis, so, while I do not know whether “I and Susie” be ungrammatical, it should sound odd, and the poet who wrote it must have done so deliberately.
That concerns English; in Latin the first person comes first: ego et rex meus. So the English order is not some natural rule— it depends on the language.