Should “The King and I” actually be “The King and Me”?
If i have a picture of myself with a king, and someone says, “Who is in that in the picture?” Wouldn’t i say “The King and Me?” (Which could be turned around to read "Me and the king, which is correct, right?). In this case, “The king and I” = “us”
But if I am going to a ballgame with the king, I would say “The King and I are going to the game.” In this case, “the king and I” = we.
I can rationalize both ways, but which is grammatically correct for the title “The King and I”? Would it have been just as correct if it was called “The King and Me”?
Us is object case, as well as me, so the king and me is same as saying us. Prescriptively the answer to Who is that? would be The King and I, because it’s a predicate nominative (*is *is a form of be). But in English people often use the objective case (the King and me) to inject a stronger affective dimension to the noun phrase. Just like when you knock on a door and people ask, “Who is it?” It’s usually most natural to say, “It’s me,” even though prescriptively the subject case would be expected (It’s I), which very few people would naturally say.
“The King and I are going to the ballgame”. When you are not sure about me/I, drop the other person and say the sentence again “I am going to the ballgame”. [not “me am going to the ballgame”]
“Give the pictures to the King and me.” Again, drop the other person and repeat the sentence to find the correct I/me. “Give the pictures to me.” [not “Give the pictures to I”.]
guizot is right that answering the door “It is I” is grammatically proper. But we use the colloquialism “It is me”
“The King and I” is the title of a musical and titles are names, not sentences, regardless of their form. They don’t have to follow the rules of grammar.
As an incomplete sentence, either is correct. You can dream up complete sentences where one or the other would be correct, but that’s a different story.
To stay on topic, try it like NewUser100 suggests and eliminate the other guy. So the question becomes, “Which is correct, me or I?”
That is not “mere prescriptivism”, it is basic English grammar. Descriptively, no-one says “Kiss I”, or “Give it to I”, or “Me went to the city”, (unless, perhaps, they are Rastafarians or cavemen).
If the King and I are in the picture, it is a picture of the King and me. Which pronoun is correct depends on what role (if any) is being played by the phrase within a sentence.
As others have already said, neither phrase is a sentence (and thus neither grammatical or ungrammatical by itself) but if it is put into a sentence functioning as the subject, it should be “The King and I”, and if it is functioning as an object (direct or indirect) it should be “The King and me”.
Bob++, see post #3. It is common, and especially acceptable in informal speech, to use “me” at the end if a sentence, and the implied, omitted part of the sentence* would clearly show the pronoun is an object.
*We often do this when answering a question. I can’t remember the term for it – “hiatus,” maybe?
By the way, we get this construction from French – 1066 and all that. “L’état, c’est moi,” not “l’état, c’est je.”.
True, but listening to how people talk in other contexts indicates the rules aren’t as simple as you seem to imagine, even in mainstream dialects of American and British English.
To add, the object case, “me,” is slowly expanding at the expense of the subject case, “I,” so that “Me and the King went to the store” is a common colloquial construction, acceptable in certain registers but absolutely forbidden in formal writing.
For that reason teachers correct “…and me” to “…and I” with such regularity that people learn a hypercorrect rule, “Oh noes! An ‘and’! I must throw logic and my native language out the window, and replace ‘me’ with ‘I’!” Leading to “The King and I” in the object case, which is never correct (except, as mentioned above, when the whole unit is a title and thus not subject to this rule).
It’s odd how wrong the technically-grammatically-correct usage can seem. There is brought to mind the line in the comic poem The Jackdaw of Rheims – "And, heedless of grammar, they all cried, ‘That’s him !’ " Proper grammar would have been “That’s he” – but nowadays for sure, that feels extremely awkward and stilted – perhaps less so in the 19th century, when the poem was written?
Is “That’s he” actually correct for English, or is it a rule created and promoted on a (false) analogy with Latin, like “never split an infinitive”? (Edit: and “never end a sentence with a preposition.”)
I looked up “it is i” and “it is me” in google’s ngram viewer
It is I was pretty clearly more popular throughout the 1700s and into the 1800s but by 1850, they had reached a point of equilibrium and it is me began to overtake and in the 1960s it is I pretty much went and died. I imagine when the Jackdaw of Rheims was written which I believe was around the 1830s-40s, they were reacting pretty strongly to the perceived encroachment of an ungrammaticality.
As far as I know the arguments for “That’s he” are that since it is a restatement of the subject, it should remain in the nominative case and since latin requires the complements of its copulas to remain in the nominative, english should as well.