I’m well aware of the relationship of objects to the verb.
That’s why called it a “rule of thumb” in my attempt to explain it to someone who was having trouble, because in my experience as someone who pays attention to this stuff, and who grades students papers on a regular basis, the most common time that people make this mistake is in situations like the examples i’ve been giving, where there’s a preposition involved.
That’s not what you said, though. You said that “objects come after a preposition.” No. Objects of the preposition come after a preposition. Objects of the sentence/phrase (what “object,” unmarked, is usually taken to mean) are related to the verb, not any preposition, and generally come after it.
It may well be the case that the error complained of happens more frequently with objects of prepositions than objects of verbs. But explaining it in an inaccurate way sows more confusion than good. Why not just say, “This error usually happens with objects of the preposition, and a good way to tell if you’re dealing with an object of the preposition is…”?
The subject of a finite verb is always in subject form (nominative case). Use of the predicate (objective) form as the second half of a compound subject, as in the OP examples, though not unheard of, is generally considered substandard usage even in colloquial speech.
The converse also holds true: use of the subject-form pronouns as part of a compound object (direct or indifect object of verb or object of preposition) is likewise considered substandard. Just as “Jake and me went swimming” is considered improper, so is “Sam went for a ride with Jake and I.”
Notes:
– The subject of an infinitive is in objective form. “She wanted me to go with her” is not equivalent to “She wanted me” but rather to “She wanted events to transpire such that I went with her”; syntactically the “me” is the subject of “to go”.
– A precisionist expects a predicate nominative: “It was he who finally agreed.” But very commonly at all strata of English usage, the objective-form pronouns are the ones in common use after forms of “to be”: “It’s me”; “After several ballot recounts, it was finally announced that the winner was him.” There’s a famous anecdote of Queen Elizabeth using “It’s me” to two little girls.
– Disjunct constructions using “who(/whom)” as a relative pronoun will often take “who” in colloquial register where “whom” would be expected in precisionist usage: “She finally decided who she would go to the dance with.” “The director announced who he would cast as ‘Charley’.” Note that if these sentences are recast as non-disjunct constructions, “whom” becomes expected: “She finally decided with whom she would go to the dance.”
Fine. Here you go:
When a first person pronoun is needed as part of a group, and when that group constitutes the object of a sentence (i.e., verb object) or the object of a preposition, the appropriate form is “me” and not “I.”
e.g.
John drove Peter and me to the film. (verb object)
John came to the film with Peter and me. (preposition object)
My main point was that looking out for a preposition is a pretty good first step if you’re not sure how to use the pronouns. That’s one rule of thumb my grade 7 English teacher suggested, and it actually did a pretty good job of conditioning the members of our class to get it right.
What a twerp. You can say that about any linguistic rule whatsoever. “[it] can be any case it wants”? Seriously.
The main reason, I think, that Rhodes scholars and Ivy Leaguers screw it up is because of the thought process that goes into making such statements. My mom left me the following voicemail yesterday:
“I just wanted to see what you were up to next weekend. Me, John, and Sara want to come down to visit and maybe go to Annapolis later.”
Why’d she make that error? Because she hadn’t planned out that part of the sentence. Mentally point to your chest and identify yourself in the first person. Do you say “I” or “me”? If you’re like most, you say “me”. It’s the same reason you use to answer “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?” with “Who? Me?”
So my mother knew she was calling to tell me about an impending visit. Her thought process went:
Tell him what you want to know
“…wanted to see what you were up to…”
When?
“…next weekend.”
Mention the visit. Say “visit Annapolis”
“We want to visit…”
Wait! You should clarify who’s going. Who’s visiting?
“Me”
Who else?
“John and Sara”
OK, now mention the visit
“Me, John, and Sara want to come down…”
You see? It’s all about the self-reference. In her internal dialogue, she was the object of a verb, i.e. “The people that are coming are me, John, and Sara”. The same thing happened to me a few months ago, which caused my grandmother to brow beat me with her grammar lessons:
“We were going to dinner- Joyce and me- and she said…”
If it were natural to answer the question “Who?” with “I.”, then I suspect this wouldn’t be an issue at all.
This seems to me like a total non sequitur. Pinker is saying that it’s okay to change “I am going” to “Me and Jennifer are going”, and supports this with the example that it is okay to change “Jennifer is” to “She and Jennifer are”. But “Jennifer is” changes to “She and Jennifer are” for a logical reason – because the subject changes from singular to plural. In the passage you quoted, as far as I can tell, Pinker doesn’t provide any logical reason why “I am going” should be changed to “Me and Jennifer are going”… “I” is the subject, and changing it to “Me and Jennifer” does not change that fact. His argument simply seems to be that the example proves that you can just do whatever you want.
Odd how times change.
My mother, born in 1908, was taught Sampiro’s method. She used to recount a story
where her elementary school teacher took the children, one by one, and put them on the outside of the school door (a one-room country school). The children were instructed to knock and answer a question put to them.
<Knock Knock>
“Who is it?” asked the teacher.
Most children: “It’s me!”
They were not allowed in until they correctly replied, “It is I”
Let’s not get wound around the axle with my personal bugaboo, the lie / lay confusion.
an seanchai
And while thinking of this thread driving home yesterday, I heard the national CBS news anchor on the radio referring to a murder as a “domestic matter between he and his girlfriend.” :rolleyes:
So THAT GUY purports to be providing GUIDANCE on how to write clearly and READABLY, but he fills his text with LINKS that are NOT only BOLDED and in a DIFFERENT color, but UNDERLINED and capitalized too! Sheesh! Some people should not be allowed access to CSS!
Exactly. Language does not need to be logical or regular. Prescriptivists have corrected a problem that did not exist. Mostly because they assumed that the rules of Latin grammar should also apply to English grammar.
“me” is a possible form of the subjective case of the first-person pronoun, when the pronoun is used with a conjunction. “Me and Sally went to the store” is perfectly valid English and is a common colloquial form.
The object of the verb “be” is subjective in English. Nevermind how Latin does it. “It’s I” sounds wrong because it is wrong. “It’s me” is correct.
Couple points:
“Me” is never used as the subject of the sentence. What the OP is referring to is the phenomenon of “X and me” or “Me and X.”
Yes, the rule is correct and hasn’t changed at least in the grammar books I use that have have been printed in the last 3-4 years: “me” is used as the object pronoun, “I” is used as the subject pronoun.
This phenomenon is called overgeneralization. As “X and me” is correct when used in the object, people overgeneralize and start using it in the subject. It “sounds” correct to them because they’re so used to hearing it.
Oddly, “Me and X” sounds correct to me, especially when used to answer a question:
A: He and I went to the store.
B: Sorry, I didn’t hear…who went to the store?
C: Me and him went to the store.
“Me and Sally went to the store” is plainly wrong. You’re just used to hearing it. It has nothing to do with rules of Latin grammar. Do you say “We went to the store” or “Us went to the store”? How about “Us goed to the store”? Why not?
So you agree that it is a common colloquial form, yes?
That has nothing to do with the question of whether or not “Me and Sally went to the store” is grammatical. It has a conjunctive subject. None of your examples do.
My sentence is grammatical because that’s how many people say it. Your first sentence is also grammatical because many people say it. Your last two sentences are not grammatical because people do not speak that way.
Same here. As a kid we all said “me and Joe were walking down the street” and now I get all sorts of people writing “send the email to Joe and I”. I think they’re overcorrecting.
What I wonder about is “than I” versus “than me”. My wife says “she is older than I”, but I think it should be “older than me”. She’s thinking of “older than I [am]”, but if you leave “am” out I would think it should be “me”. But I’m no grammer expert. Which is correct?
A common mistake that drives me nuts is people posting pictures with a caption like “My mother and I.”
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx
Summary: depends, neither is egregiously wrong.
Plainly wrong? Are you saying it is objectively wrong according to some Ideal English that exists in the ether? Or is it merely bucking the conventions of what is often labeled Standard English? Because one is a legitimate complaint. The other is not. Were it to happen that people who say “Me and Sally went to the store.” become the majority, then the grammatical way to phrase the sentence would be “Me and Sally went to the store.”
There’s nothing grammatically wrong with that caption except possibly it’s a sentence fragment which is not what we’re discussing here. There is no context to determine if “I” or"me" is proper. The sentence fragment could be short for “My mother and I are shown in this picture.” or “This picture shows my mother and me.”
Now I would say, it’s not a good caption if the scrapbook or whatever is intended to be saved a long time since later people may have no idea to whom “I” refers, but that’s different too.
What’s interesting to note, and French speakers can correct me if I’m wrong, is that French does exactly this. “Vincent et moi allons chez moi.” (“Vincent and me are going to my home.”) Or “C’est moi” (“It’s me.”) So it’s not just English that uses objective case pronouns in the nominative under certain circumstances. Which makes me think that there is some reason these sorts of constructions sound natural to our ears. While I certainly know that “Me and Bob are going to St. Louis” is technically objectionable according to most authorities of Standard American English, the alternative “I and Bob are going to St. Louis” sounds terrible. Sure, I could say “Bob and I,” but if I want to put myself in the primary position in a compound subject, “me” sounds like the more natural pronoun. So, it seems that in a position of stress, “me” is preferable to “I” by most English speakers (so far as I can tell) in a compound subject.
Your link is about writing. The OP said he had been **hearing **these constructions:
A lot of well educated people find it natural to say things like “Me and Mike went to the store.” It seems to me that this is one rule that people must be taught, and they don’t find it natural and easy to remember. Not many rules of spoken grammar are like that for native speakers are they? I am genuinely curious. Is this an example of a rule imposed on English by people who have over-thought things?