Comments on: Mismatched Pronouns Again

By: dean p

dean p — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:29:16 +0000

To throw in my gratuitous two cents, I believe the use of “I” in groups of two pronouns, whether objective or subjective, is a reaction to lifetimes of corrections for using “me” when “I” was proper. Now you hear everyone, on radio and television, spreading this grammatical “virus”. But I guess that’s just language; it precisely mirrors its speakers, both you and I.

By: Leonore Dvorkin

Leonore Dvorkin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:09:21 +0000

It should be relatively easy to teach the correct use of English pronouns. If the pronoun follows a preposition, it needs to be in the objective case: me, you, him, her, it, us, them. Between is a preposition. Therefore, it is “Between him and me,” or “between us,” or “between John and me.”
I have also read, as I did just today in an e-mail message to me, “Friday is a holiday for Tim and I.” There, too, for is a preposition, and so the person should have written, “for Tim and me.”
By the way, as a tutor of Spanish, I need to point out that in Spanish, “entre tú y yo” — “between you and I,” with BOTH of the pronouns in the subjective case, is correct. That makes me wonder whether this current use of “I” where it should be “me” is at least partly due to the influence of widely spoken languages such as Spanish, in which the subject pronoun is correct in places where it would be wrong in English.

By: rbeard

rbeard — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:15:43 +0000

Stephen,

Actually, you may be on to something that I never thought of. I still use “whom” simply because it lasted longer in the South than North; however, my wife tends to say, “It is I”, rather than, “It is me” because of a misinformed lesson in grammar school.

This misuse of “I” comes from Latin and other languages that observe case forms (different endings on nouns and pronouns depending on their use in the sentence). In Latin and other such languages, after a connective verb like “be, become, remain” indicating some state of being rather than an actioin, the noun following these verbs are in the nominative (subject) case.

This is because the accusative (object) case indicates the noun that something happens to. In “The man bit the dog” it is the dog that something happens to, so you would say in all languages the equivalent of “he bit him”. But “he is him” is proper only in English were “him” is no longer a strict object case but a transitional state of case dying out.

“It is I” : “between John and I” has that same strained sense about it. I don’t think the latter was derived from the former but I’m beginning to think that it did influence it.

–RB

By: Stephen Waldman

Stephen Waldman — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:41:45 +0000

I’m probably just reaching beyond my intellectual grasp (how unusual!), but it’s always seemed to me that ‘I’ for ‘me’ is an over-reaction to a common error of youth, and that part of that makes ‘I’ sound ‘high-tone’ to us, rather like ‘Whom shall I say is calling?’ I suppose my mind made an association with Latinate (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon) vocabulary. Thank you. Stephen

By: rbeard

rbeard — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 04:33:28 +0000

I don’t quite follow this since the Latin pronunciatio of I is short [ee]. How the pronunciation of the pronoun affects its substituting for me doesn’t quite click, either. Could you explain a bit deeper?

By: Stephen Waldman

Stephen Waldman — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:46:03 +0000

I think it’s possible that a factor in this is what may be called ‘error by pretension’. Is it the Latinate sound of ‘I’? Another example in grammar: ‘Whom shall I say is calling?’ In vocabulary: misuse of ‘reticent’ and (with apologies to you, but I insist) ‘comprise’.