Stevie Wonder, “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”: No one is better than I; I know I’m just an average guy. Edit: Which is right, of course.
**Wilco **had a great duet w/ **Feist **on their last album called “You and I”
You and I
We might be strangers
How ever close we get sometimes
Its like we never met
But you and I
I think we can take it
All the good with the bad
Make something that no one else has, But
You and I
You and I
Me and You
What can we do
When the words we use
sometimes are misconstrued
If I’m remembering my high school grammar correctly, the “me” in this case is a predicate nominitive, not an object, and so should be “I.”
But then he beefed it at the end…
You and I
You and me
will live together
Eternally…
Things are actually not quite that simple. A more accurate descriptive generalization is that “I” is used only for subjects of finite clauses, and “me” is used for everything else. This explains why we find “me” in subject position of several kinds of nonfinite clauses, and also why we find “me” in positions that are neither subjects nor objects:
What, me worry? (subject of bare-form verb)
Me/my doing this might irritate you. (subject of gerund)
Me, I don’t know what to say. (left-dislocated subject)
Who did it? Me. (isolation)
Poor me! (modified, isolation)
[Pointing at a picture] This is me when I was six. (predicative complement)
Try replacing any of the above "me"s with “I” and notice how bad the result sounds.
Now, the facts become even more complicated once we introduce coordinated pronouns (“you and I”, etc.), and this is where prescriptivism has had a lot of influence. But the justification behind the prescriptivism isn’t so much “I = subject, me = object”, but rather that the choice between “I” and “me” should not be affected by coordination. This is reflected in the fact that the advice-givers recommend replacing “you and I/me” with “I/me” and seeing how it sounds in order to determine the right choice, and this is what I mean when I say that there is a tacit assumption that “you and I” and “I” should have the same grammatical distribution.
I think a far more sensible rule is that ‘You and I’ is correct when it could be substituted with ‘we’, and ‘you and me’ when it could be substituted with ‘us’, especially as it almost never requires changing any of the rest of the sentence to see if it ‘sounds right’.
Then you can compare
*Just we, sharing our lives together…
to
Just us, sharing our lives together….
*it’s we and the bottle makes three doesn’t quite work for this test only because ‘x makes three’ needs the other two to be explicit.
(but to me, “It’s you and me”/“It’s us” sounds right. I don’t think I’d use ‘we’ unless the phrase is immediately followed by ‘who’. It’s also a great line in that song.)
This, truth is beauty, beauty is truth