Very interesting! I was worried that this might just be hypercorrect bias*, but I checked Old English (to my very limited ability) and it seems to bear you out, meaning that the ngram probably does map when the shift happened.
*because these are published, edited works
While i agree with what you are saying here, you misrepresent what I wrote. I didn’t tack on anything to the answer “The King and me”. So if someone says “who is in that picture?”, a complete sentence would be “the king and me.” Correct? Because if it was just me in that picture, the answer would be “me” not “i”
I think these two posts sum up the issue and the answer best for me.
It depends on how it is being used in a sentence, not as a stand alone title.
So, if the authors called the show “I”, that would sound grammatically incorrect, even if as a title anything can go. There is no sentence with a one word title. But still, wouldn’t the play be better named “Me”?
Thanks for all of the replies thus far.
No, if it were just you in the picture, you could indeed say “I” or “I am” or “It is I” without there being anything grammatically incorrect.
If I remember my high school grammar correctly, in a sentence like “It is I,” the “I” is a predicate nominative, not a direct object, so it should be the nominative pronoun (“I”) rather than the objective “me.”
If you want to be really grammatically precise, wouldn’t “I” always be a grammatically correct answer to “Who,” and “me” a grammatically correct answer to “Whom”?
There is no such thing as “grammatically precise”.
So it depends on whether or not “I” am a subject of the king in question? What if he objects?
The King and I is based on a movie called Anna and the King of Siam, which is based on a book also called Anna and the King of Siam. This book is semi-autobiographical, and written in the first person.
Therefore, it is fair to guess that the whole sentence of which The King and I is a fragment, is something like “This is the story of the King of Siam and I,” which is in fact wrong. On the other hand, if it’s something like “Mongkut, the King, and I, Anna,” an emphasis on their social classes, and not part of a sentence, “I” is a better choice. It follows a titling convention, cf., I, Claudius.
You’re about 600 years off there, dear, that’s (purportedly)Louis XIV
The example phrase is by Louis XIV. I doubt the use of the accusative as a disjunctive pronoun started with him as well.
More and more I’m hearing people using “I”, regardless of context. Especially TV journalists, who should know better. I think they’re assuming that somehow “I” is more acceptable, or more proper-sounding, which has the opposite effect of making them sound illiterate. For example, they’d never use the phrase “him and me,” in spite of the fact that in in certain contexts it totally correct.
Drives me nuts. Especially when they come up with “him and I.”
And when they really haven’t got a clue whether it should be ‘him and me’ or ‘him and I’, they end up defaulting to the ridiculous ‘him and myself’.
Nails on a chalkboard.
To me the problem does seem to come down to how we are to suppose the phrase fits into the rest of the unstated sentence. “Me and Bobby McGee” would fit into a context like"good enough for me and Bobby McGee. “The King and I” fits into “The King and I dance.”
I don’t necessarily agree that we have to resort the assumption that using the subject/object distinction makes it necessarily a Latin rule applied to English usage. English does have these cases naturally, even if the forms of the words only continue to reflect them for a few pronouns anymore.
This reminds me of a version I read of the Judgement of Paris. The golden apple had written on it “bellissimae” – which could mean several things, but we know in the story it means “to the most beautiful (female)”. The apple was thrown into a crowd with no preamble, and Ovid does not record anybody standing around saying “the most beautiful women do what?” (though my version will, whenever I get around to writing my own droll Roman comedy, right after I’ve finished translating Who’s on First). I have to suppose that the Romans would not have had the difficulty I have seeing that as just obviously saying what the story wants it to mean.
I wasn’t talking about the case distinctions full stop, but about the case in the predicate where Latin uses the predicate nominative but French and modern English does not. It looks like historically English did, as well, so it’s a moot point. Latin is a parallel system, is all.
It may well be that I have a naive view that it simply makes sense to use the subject case in expressions of this kind. On Lexicon Valley, Slate’s language podcast, linguist John McWhorter claims that this is and the who/whom distinction are not real rules of English at all. Seems to me that if “Joey and me went to the park” is correct it’s because it’s an exception, not a rule. Latin also seems to have a lot of weird quirks, and at the risk of being taken to the woodshed some of these look like they’d be simply considered wrong if somebody hadn’t ratified them into rule status by documenting and naming them.
As I noted earlier, colloquialisms *sometimes *are how we speak "normally. That doesn’t change the grammar rule; they are simply accepted in the exception times that we use them.
This is kind of an interesting point. Or at least I’ve always found it interesting. I would never say “I and Bob are going to the ballgame.” It would always be “Me and Bob are going to the ballgame.” Now, I suppose I can invert it, so it’s “Bob and I are going to the ballgame,” but that’s a very slightly different sentence. If I want to place the pronoun representing me at the head of the sentence (say, for emphasis), the only natural-sounding choice I have, I’d argue, is “Me and Bob.” (Or, I suppose, the even more maligned “Myself and Bob,” but let’s not go there yet.) There doesn’t appear to be a satisfactory formal way that will please the sticklers to write the sentence with that structure, unless I’m odd for thinking that “I and Bob are going to the ballgame” sounds ungrammatical and stilted.
‘The King and I’ is correct if the case is nominative (‘The King and I went to Siam’). ‘The King and me’ is correct if the case is dative (‘The book was a present to the King and me’) or accusative (‘The play was presented for the King and me’).
The issue is that the pronoun should* not* come first. One can’t use one grammatical error to justify then having to use a second grammatical error. Because a song’s lyrics put the pronoun first (“Me and my shadow”) does not make the structure correct in normal usage outside of the song. And I don’t see how there is any less emphasis using the correct structure (“Bob and I”) or any more emphasis using the incorrect one (“Me and Bob”).
But why shouldn’t the pronoun come first? It certainly can in my spoken language (native speaker), suggesting it’s a stylistic preference and not a rule of grammar.
Yes, it’s a fairly common rule of syle or politeness, not grammar, that “me” or “I” should come last.
Cites:
http://www.learnersdictionary.com/blog.php?action=ViewBlogArticle&ba_id=109