Yeah, I realized that as a possibility after I posted. But if I wanted to keep a parallel sentence construction, for whatever rhetorical or stylistic reasons, “me” sounds like the more idiomatic choice of the two.
Excellent post.
I’d actually say that in a certain register, “Would you mind giving a ride to Carole and I?” is becoming acceptable. That register would be precisely those people who partially learned the rule for the formal register. Maybe it’s a quasiregister or something :). But language moves as speakers and audiences move, and it seems to me that enough people are starting to use the object “I” that it’s becoming a convention of sorts.
As Polycarp points out, you shouldn’t misuse registers. I’ll add one more example. As a second-grade teacher who sometimes invites experts to give talks to the classroom, I am woefully familiar with the politician/pedagogue/musician/etc. guest who comes to the classroom and talks to my second-graders in a wholly inappropriate register. “India’s educational establishment,” one said (I paraphrase here to capture the register), “is transforming itself from a previous system of didactic lectures to a more participatory model in which students learn through constructivist principles.” After five minutes of this, I was dedicating most of my energy to keeping students from crawling around on the floor or getting in smackfights or whatever. A proper register for a college classroom is absolutely not the proper one for a second-grade class.
A subject doesn’t become an object by making it plural. “We are going to the store” is correct, not “Us are going to the store.”
Becoming deaf to the sound of incorrect grammar doesn’t make it correct. “Ain’t” isn’t correct grammar even though many, many people use it. No one is saying that you can’t use whatever phrases you like, and you’ll surely be understood. But you have to realize that it sounds childish or uneducated to anyone who doesn’t speak that way - no matter how many people use your usage where you are from. And you may not realize how many people really do or do not use it where you are from because you’re not tuned in to it.
Say what?, Sure it is. There is nothing at all ungrammatical about how “ain’t” is used. It may be considered “non-standard” or “colloquial” or otherwise inappropriate in the most formal of contexts, but it’s not ungrammatical. You have to remember what register or dialect you’re speaking in. Plenty of highly educated people use “ain’t” as well as the “him and I/me and Sarah” type constructions in everyday speech. Know your audience, and all that.
And we are not talking about plural subjects either.
For someone complaining about “uneducated” speech, you are displaying a large lack of knowledge about grammar.
It hasn’t changed. I blame the public schools for not bothering to teach English grammar any more.
Heh, and see, I blame the public schools for misteaching grammar to so many people of your generation and mine. Grammar is a great subject, and there are so many people who still display the same wretched ignorance about it that we’re seeing in this thread.
Yeah, I used the wrong word. It’s not considered formal.
No. Not an excellent post. This was a professional email sent corporate-wide. My new boss lost a lot of credibility points (in my view) by using “myself” incorrectly. I’ve reported directly into CEOs before, and these types of elementary grammatical errors were never made or tolerated. You do not use xxx or myself; you use xxx or me. Period. One is correct; the other is not.
As with most disciplines and arts, it is well to know the rules before you branch off on your own, breaking them in extraordinarily creative ways.
Pinker knows how to write standard sentences that communicate precisely. As a scientist, he must.
Always listen to your elders.
But to me the misuse stands out like a sore thumb. Most people that I know don’t speak that way and I live in Nashville. My classmates in a rural area small town didn’t speak that way either. We even laughed at people who talked that way. That would have been fifty years ago.
How do you know that they are not teaching it to those who are present and paying attention?
What did you guys think of the song “Me and My Shadow”?
Anyhow, I understand some people will find this objectionable. But it’s a common enough construction among my peers, mostly college-educated urban folk, that I don’t notice it at all. If I want to put myself in the head of a compound subject, I will always use “me.” As the second part of a compound subject, I will usually use “I”, but will occasionally slip into “me,” depending on the group of people I’m talking to. (I tend to unconsciously imitate the speech structures I hear around me.)
Look, what’s the argument supposed to be here?
“The first person pronoun that goes in the blank in ‘John and ___ went to the store’ should be in the nominative because it is the subject of the sentence.”
But it’s not the subject. The first person pronoun is going to be part of the subject, but it is not, itself, the subject.
“The first person pronoun that goes in the blank in ‘John and ___ went to the store’ should be in the nominative because it is part of the subject of the sentence.”
But being part of the subject doesn’t mean it must be in the nominative. The following is incorrect:
“The cat that bit I was rabid.”
So then, what’s the argument?
“The first person pronoun that goes in the blank in ‘John and ___ went to the store’ should be in the nominative because as a rule, in compound subjects, each compounded element should be in the nominative.”
But now we’ve got a rule that doesn’t claim to rely on any principle dealing with anything more general than sentences with compound subjects. You guys have been trying to say that we can know what to do with compound subjects by looking at more general principles about subjects. But the rule just cited doesn’t rely on any general rule about subjects. It’s arbitrary in that sense–exactly as arbitrary as would be
“The first person pronoun that goes in the blank in ‘John and ___ went to the store’ should be in the objective because as a rule, in compound subjects, each compounded element should be in the objective.”
If you’re claiming that there’s something more “logical” about using the nominative, then this can’t be the rule you’re citing.
So it doesn’t work to point out that the word is the subject–because it’s not.
It doesn’t work to point out that the word is part of the subject–because that’s irrelevant.
So what’s the general principle here? What is it that is supposed to make it more “logical” to use the nominative?
The answer, I would think, is tradition and inertia.
And everyone who is saying that “I don’t say that!” why doncha let me follow you around with a microphone for a day and we’ll see what you do say. You probably wouldn’t like the results. But without some sort of verified transcript of you talking, you can’t legitimately say that you don’t use a particular construction because human memory is very fallible. I point this out only because I suspect a lot more people use me as part of the subject depending on the context and type of sentence.
This too. People don’t really know what they do and don’t say in everyday speech.
I had a friend who insisted that the first sound in the word “Truck” is a ‘t’ sound. I was arguing that the first sound is a “ch”. (I had noticed this before about the speech of my peers, but I had just learned in a linguistics course that this is pretty much universal in the English speaking world.)
She insisted she would never pronounce the word with an initial ch sound.
And she would demonstrate for us how she pronounced the word. And when she demonstrated it, she was using a ch sound. And yet at the same time, she was insisting that it was a t sound.
Not exactly the same as what we’re talking about, but along the same lines.
The thrust of Pinker’s argument above seems to have been lost.
It’s common (indeed, in this very thread) to say “You’d never say ‘me went to the store,’ so you shouldn’t say ‘John and me went to the store.’” But by the very same logic, we ought to say “You’d never say ‘John are going to the store,’ so you shouln’t say ‘John and I are going to the store.’”
So you can see this logic doesn’t work. Add this to my list of arguments that don’t work in my post two previous to this one.
Actually, you’re both kind of right, if you want to really be nitpicky about it, as “ch” is “t” + “sh”, as indicated by the IPA symbols for ch: /tʃ/. So “t” is the first sound in “truck,” although it would not be analyzed by an English speaker as a “t,” but as a “ch.”
But, yeah, I know what you’re saying. Anyhow, I think most of us agree that in formal writing and formal speech using the objective pronoun in compound subjects is frowned upon. That’s fine. What I find interesting is the question of why, in more casual and natural contexts, do English speakers find the objective in a compound subject preferable in many cases, especially when the first person pronoun heads the sentence. Why does “me and Bob went to the store” sound preferable to “I and Bob went to the store?” (at least to me and, I’d presume many of my peers.) Has anyone ever heard the latter construction in use? I never have, although it’s perfectly logical. Why is the instinct to either change the “I” to “me,” or to flip the subjects, so that the sentence becomes “Bob and I”? To me, that’s what’s interesting about this whole discussion.
What I surmise is happening is what happens in French, where similar forms (called disjunctive or stress pronouns) are found in similar situations. I wonder if the roots of this construction in English was picked up via French.
It’s not the very same logic, though. One relates to the use of nominative versus accusative case, and one relates to the use of singular versus plural verb conjugation. The point is that case doesn’t change just because number does, whereas conjugation plainly does - that’s its raison d’etre - whether for number or for person. (“You would never say ‘I is going to the store’ so you shouldn’t say 'John is going to the store.” :smack: )
In Ireland, “please return it to John or myself” is entirely acceptable even in a business context and should not, as some posters have suggested, be taken as a sign of borderline idiocy or hypercorrection.
In Hiberno-English (the principal dialect of English spoken in Ireland) these forms serve as “emphatic pronouns” as well as reflexive pronouns. Emphatic pronouns can even be used without an antecedent: “Where’s himself?” “Myself and the mot and the mot’s mammy went to the pictures.”