The Vine: November 9, 2011
My cat is perfectly well-behaved and I am happily married (30 years later!) to my high-school sweetheart, so of course this must be a grammar issue. It seems that too many people have forgotten the rule about when to say “other person and I” vs. “other person and me.” As a grammar expert, would you please do a public service announcement on this?
No, it doesn’t sound “classy”
Dear Classy,
And now, a short play.
Sarah: “Hey Ma, me and Agent Weiss are riding bikes, see you later.”
Ma: “Who’s riding bikes?”
Sarah: “Me and Agent Weiss.”
Ma: “Who’s riding bikes?”
Sarah: “Me. And Agent Weiss? About yay tall, glasses?”
Ma: “Who’s riding bikes?”
Sarah: “AGH FINE Agent Weiss and I will now commence the riding of the bicycle machines, Your Motherness!”
Seventeen times a day, a variation on that.
So anyway, yes, I’d be happy to. As simply put as I can: “I” is a nominative. It means it’s the subject of the sentence or verb clause or what have you. “I am riding bikes,” “I rode my bike to the store,” et cetera.
“Me,” meanwhile, is an accusative — the object. It’s the object of verbs, a la “Agent Weiss put me on her handlebars,” and of prepositions, a la “Agent Weiss is riding bikes with me.” (The verb “to be,” annoyingly, is a special case; it doesn’t generally take an accusative, except in the infinitive. So, “The pair of girls riding bikes is Agent Weiss and I” sounds tortured and pretentious, but is correct. “The pair of girls riding bikes is going to be Agent Weiss and me” is also correct. “It is I”; “it has to be me.” English — gotta love it.)
Exceptions aside, if that’s even possible when it comes to English (sigh), figuring out when to use “Agent Weiss and I” versus “Agent Weiss and me” is pretty much a matter of subtracting the “Agent Weiss” part from the compound, and choosing whether a subject or an object is called for. “Agent Weiss and I are riding bikes” is correct, because the noun phrase is the subject of the sentence. “Pip is riding bikes with Agent Weiss and me” is correct, because the noun phrase is the object of the preposition. (A full list of prepositions is here.)
You made a joke about “classy,” and that’s almost it — it’s an overcorrection, which I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere in the past, and no doubt it proceeds from the same kind of well-meaning, but not necessarily instructive, dialogue I used to have with my mother. People who didn’t get thorough usage instruction in school, or who didn’t care about it or don’t read a lot or whatever, may have mistakenly interpreted it as “‘other person and me’ is always incorrect,” so they just automatically revert to “other person and I,” even when it’s not called for.
You’ll find more on “I versus me” at Grammar Girl.
Tags: grammar our friend English
Hee, I am totally a Your Motherness. It’s what makes parenthood worthwhile.
My 16 year old who is in honors English and whose teacher just informed him that he was no longer being graded on a curve, but against himself, when writing essays (due to awesomeness of said essays / ruining of the curve for his peers) still, constantly, says, “Me and A are going to a movie.” Not even “A and me are going….”
The kid’s dad taught high school English for 13 years. Both his parents have Masters degrees in creative writing. And we can not pound this rule into his head.
I begin to suspect he’s doing it to torture his dad and me.
This brings to mind a language pet peeve of mine:
I have a friend who is otherwise quite articulate and has (American) English as her first (and only) language.
I’d always been taught to put the “I” last when reffering to oneself along with one or more others: “Sarah and I will go to the store,” or “Joe, Sarah and I will make dinner this evening.”
However, this friend always puts the “I” first: “I and Jeff saw a movie last night.” “I and the kids are going swimming at noon.”
Drives me nuts. Isn’t this all kinds of wrong? Or am I the one off-base here?
I have that exact same conversation with my kids sixteen times a day. Some day they’ll learn, right?
Great tutorial — now we need a section on when to use “myself.” It seems that lately many people are substituting “myself” for “me” in sentences (for instance, saying in response to the query “who is going to the concert,” “Sue, Jim, Amy, and myself”). Myself is reflexive, not a substitute for me.
Your mother deserves a follow-up essay…or five. I would love to hear more tales of Ma Bunting.
Even worse is the use of “myself”, as in “If you have any questions with regard to the information presented, please feel free to contact Jane or myself.” I’m seeing this all over the workplace lately and it makes me want to scream.
“Exceptions aside, if that’s even possible when it comes to English (sigh), figuring out when to use ‘Agent Weiss and I’ versus ‘Agent Weiss and me’ is pretty much a matter of subtracting the ‘Agent Weiss’ part from the compound…”
This is pretty much my inside-the-head standard test for determining whether to use “me” or “I”. If you sound like Tarzan when you take the other person out of the sentence (“Bob and me went to the store” turns into “Me went to the store”), then it’s most likely wrong.
Yes, as a frequent NPR listener, the overcorrecting drives me crazy. All these pundits, authors, etc talking about how something happened ‘to Jeff and I’. Or how they have to consider the best choice ‘for my family and I’. AUGH. They even ran a little pitch from a local listener during the pledge drive that included just that overcorrection. Oy.
On the basis of how I learned it, it’s wrong, yes, but not “all kinds” if I may borrow the wording. That is, it’s a matter not of grammar (the pronoun is right, after all) but of courtesy or maybe modesty — putting oneself last.
I follow the rule myself, while considering it on a slightly different level of authority than the choice of correct pronoun. But perhaps others learned/taught it differently.
The worst outcome of this overcorrection is the teeth-gritting “Blank and I’s” usage. Example: “Hey guys, the party tonight is at Steve and I’s house.” It’s even more jarring when the “and I’s” is at the end of the sentence: “Sorting through books of Steve and I’s!” Books of I’s? Didn’t everyone learn that “when in doubt, remove the other person from the sentence” trick? I know at least some of the offenders on my Facebook newsfeed did, because I went to school with them.
Is “Me and A are going to the movies” correct if it’s “Me and A, we are going to the movies”? What is that construction called, when you put the clarifying antecedent in front of the pronoun? I know it’s a common phrasing in French, not as much in English. Is this just a matter of the “we” being elided?
I’m pulling this out of my ass, but I believe that it’s an appositive phrase, and because it’s modifying the “we,” it should match it. So: no, not correct.
Unless it’s changed, it’s technically known as a hypercorrection in linguistics. Hypercorrection can become standard–the British practice of pronouncing the “h” in “herb” started as a hypercorrection, and “I feel badly for Enid” (as opposed to “I feel bad for Enid”) is standard with everybody but serious grammar nerds.
Caution to parents having this conversation regularly:
My mother and I did this repeatedly during my childhood. Now I catch her out and get to yell “Sandy and I! Sandy and I!” into the phone or make her blush in public. It may come back to haunt you. I do, however, use proper grammar and am my workplace’s resident grammar nazi. My boss and I argue about points of grammar, although he fortunately also believes in the use of the Oxford comma, so we haven’t come to blows.
I also vote for more tales of Ma Bunting.
Found it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_pronoun
Like I vaguely recalled, this is common and correct in French (native speakers chime in if I’m off base), but probably not in English. In the Wiki on French pronouns, they offer the English sentence “Me, I believe you, but I’m not sure anyone else will.” So, colloquial and emphatic.
As Sars and Carrie Ann point out, you can work it out easily just by making the sentence singular and checking if it still makes sense. “Joe and me are going out” becomes “me am going out”. Wrong. “Jenny is coming to visit Martha and I” becomes “Jenny is coming to visit I”. Also wrong.
“I and Joe are going out” isn’t wrong. It’s not common but that doesn’t make it incorrect. To me it always seems to sound somewhat formal, and stilted; “I and all of this chamber of commerce declare your pig’s-foot jam festival to be the worst event ever to occur in Lower Uhparville!”
@Carrie Ann: I guess the proper construction would be “the party tonight is at Steve’s and my house”?
Oh, Ma is sprinkled around here liberally. Put “syrup” or “Barbie” in the search box, see what exasperation comes up. (Not at the same time. Heh.) Also, “Hit The Gas.”
Gosh, now I’m nostalgic for the days when my friends and I could hop on our bikes and be set for the day, with no destination in mind and no supervision thereto. Just our schwinns and us and the open roads.
Is nobody else going to argue the contrary descriptivist position here? Okay, I’ll tackle it, and I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit here, because “mistakes” like these set my teeth on edge just like the rest of you, but even so here goes. Disclaimer: IANALinguist. I got as far as Linguistics 101. (But I knew a lot of linguistics majors!)
I’m talking here about the original rule we were all taught: that you say “Joe and I are going,” not “Joe and me are going” or “Me and Joe are going.” The hypercorrected version — “It’s between Joe and I” — is pretty clearly wrong by any lights, because no one who hasn’t had the “Joe and I” rule drilled into their head would ever say “It’s between Joe and I,” right? Well, maybe, but let’s take that as a given.
The basic argument would be something like this: The very fact that it’s so hard for people to learn to use this rule correctly suggests that it’s not a “real” rule — that is, it’s not a rule that validly describes ordinary spoken English. To put that another way, “Me is going home now” sounds wrong to pretty much everybody over the age of 2, but lots of people will hear or say “Joe and me are going home now” without having any trouble with it. The idea is that we all know how to speak our native language correctly, by definition — formalized rules may or may not accurately describe them, and this one may not. (The prohibition on split infinitives has been pretty much discredited by now, but people still teach it, even though nobody actually speaks that way.)
That’s the descriptivist position (as opposed to prescriptivist): the correct language is defined by its speakers, not by rules from a book. By the same token, @TLP_Reader, I’d argue that “I and Joe are going out” is incorrect, because it sounds wrong to a native speaker of English, and nobody would ever actually say that except to prove a point. I’m not sure what the real rule would be, but there is one.
The other half of the argument — and I’ve seen this argument made explicitly, about this exact language question — is that the mere fact that a rule makes logical sense doesn’t make it correct. In this case, the fact that we use “me” as the objective singular pronoun doesn’t necessarily mean that “Joe and me” is the correct objective plural form. It could — it sounds sensible — but it doesn’t have to.
Any properly trained linguists want to back me up, or tell me what I got wrong?
Ooh! “Hit The Gas”!
I love that one. Thanks for the reminder. Hee.
I still remember being appalled as a 6th grader when my English teacher believed the correct answer to the following fill-in-the-blank question was “I”: My parents bought tickets for my sister and ____. Sadly, I did not have the grammar background to properly explain WHY this was wrong (other than the dropping the other party from the sentence suggestion), but another teacher did back me up.
Mel,
Of COURSE he’s torturing you. It’s what makes childhood worthwhile:)
@Jas: Tarzan :-D Thanks for making me laugh after a looong day. Excellent and practical advice.
This seems to me to be an American overcorrection. In British English, I think “me” is far more common. (Also instead of “mine”, as in “me and me mates”.)
I actually happened to notice the other day that Jim Morrison, Teh Great Poet Himself (yes, I know, shut up Jim Morrison) uses this I-form just to make a rhyme: “Until the stars fall from the sky / for you and I”. Or maybe it’s just plain ignorance / arrogance ;-)
*pulls a blanket over head and starts crying*
Grammar, why do you do this to me? You start out all right, even logical, and then you start throwing exceptions and pluperfect subjunctives and appositives around and I don’t understand anything and I’M STUPID WHAAAAHHH….
Sars, will your mom make me some cookies and milk if I ask her nice(ly)?
“Hit The Gas” is totally my go-to pick-me-up TN essay. Hee. I can’t even think about it without giggling. So good.
Now, okay, my instinct would’ve been to spell it “about yea tall.” Is that just totally incorrect? Why am I thinking that? Am I crazy?
@heatherkay: In these cases: “Me, I believe you, but I’m not sure anyone else will” and (from the Wikipedia entry you linked to) “The others are leaving, but me, I’m staying,” I think the ‘me’ makes sense because it’s standing in for “as for me” or some similar phrase in which ‘me’ is governed by a preposition. That is, you are /referring/ to yourself, not speaking from your own perspective.
‘Didn’t everyone learn that “when in doubt, remove the other person from the sentence” trick?’
That’s the one I know. Seems like the easiest one as well after reading all the comments and other tricks.
THANK YOU. My (normally always correct) grammar nazi husband has tried to call me out on my occasional use of “X and me” even though I insist that particular usage is correct, for the exact reasons you described. Granted, my explanations and arguments in my defense were much less technical than yours, but the general thought was there.
(In defense of my husband, we are both math/science/grammar/etc… nerds, and frequently have spirited debates on random disputed facts, such as the number of FDR’s terms. It allows us to stretch our brains without offending the other, and keeps the energy alive.)
And as the daughter of a teacher (physics, but a grammar stickler as well) I have had the EXACT SAME conversation ad nauseum. Good times.
@Colin: Mine too, but once it was written out, it didn’t look right.
This totally drives me crazy too. And yes, I had a mother who hammered this into me and would make me repeat the correct form of speech. Yes, it was pretty annoying. What drives me more crazy then a person saying “Blank and me are going to the store” is the constant “You can come with blank and I.” No, you cannot come with I. I guess I just feel like it’s people trying to sound “smart” without really knowing what they’re being smart about. Of course, not everyone had mothers like ours :)
I tend to do the “replace with the plural” as opposed to “drop the other person,” which is probably more complicated, but that’s how I was raised. (My parents sound similar to Ma Bunting, and I think that is how you learn grammar beyond actually taking a class.) So yeah, “We are going out.”: we=I=Joe and I. “Mom’s coming to pick us up.” us=me=Joe and me
@KT: My co-worker, 25 years my senior, uses “Boss or myself” in all her letters, can’t stand it! But, she is the boss’s favorite around here, so we all suffer.
Sars, I love your “Ma” and so want to be her when I grow up! I would LOVE to know what she said when your snarky responses came out! Did you get sent to your room for talking back or did she try not to laugh in front of you? Hysterical!
My mom asked, “Who’s Meann? I don’t know any Meann. Should I talk to her parents?”
My favorite article featuring Ma Bunting is ‘To Bee…’
Technically incorrect colloquialisms bother me not at all. But between you and MEEEEEEEEEE, hypercorrection makes me nuts. Thanks to Sars and Classy for the PSA.
I’m not a linguist, although I’ve had some linguistics in my training as a foreign language geek.
@Matthias- my understanding is that you’re basically on as far as the “real language” goes. That said, the folks writing the rule books are generally native speakers themselves, so it is kind of a wash. Once that point is accepted, the interesting question becomes that of education and, to a certain extent, social and socio-economic environments. That’s a subject for another day.
I care about things like direct and indirect object pronouns mostly because they are much more important in languages without relatively fixed word order. In English, the words come in a particular, relatively predictable order. This isn’t always the case in other languages. So for example:
I invited him.
He invited me.
could also be expressed in some languages as:
Him invited I.
or
Me invited He.
I/Me matters a lot in this case, because who invited whom could have meaningful implications for meal planning and/or picking up the tab. That said, if you live in a part of the world where the object pronouns are that important, you tend to learn them. Unfortunately, at least from my perspective, these pronouns don’t have the same import in English, and therefore don’t “really matter”. The word order makes the sentence make sense, as a general rule, making the subject/object pronouns less critical. So, from a structural, “Do we, the native speakers of this particular language, need for this to be this way in order to remove ambiguity” kind of perspective, the distinction between subject and object pronouns is unimportant in English.
Is it a losing battle? Probably. Am I still going to notice it when the first-year students at my college write it? Absolutely.
Me, I’m a geek like that.
So glad this was addressed here! “XX and I” used incorrectly drives me nuts. And from what I read these days, it’s not even incorrect any more, “XX and me” in those cases is now just “the preferred form.” Ugh. One of my English instructors in college used to remind us that for “X and I” (used correctly) you can substitute “we,” whereas for “X and I” you can substitute “us.” So while I know “us” is also often misused, no one in their right mind would try to say, “This is between we.” Just another way to remember this, maybe…
Oops, I meant for “X and me” you can substitute “us.” Duh, sorry!
Indeed, riding bikes with you, on the handlebars or not, was great fun!
Oh dear God. It is not the preferred form, it is not more acceptable in England or the Commonwealth and nor does it simply ‘come more naturally’ to everyone.
Just because this error is made by many, does not make it okay. As the numerous responses to this column show. For those over the age of eight who continue to make these mistakes: you should know you are being judged by others as a result.
Harsh, I know. But super important to know if not for casual coversation, then for important engagements, job interviews etc. Although, as this column makes clear, even in casual conversation many people will be silently correcting you if you still muck this up.
“Preferred form”? “PREFERRED form“?? What nonsense is this? (Oh, suziQ, won’t you Internet-marry me? You’re a prescriptivist after my own tiny, geeky, diamond-hard heart.)
@Amy: It’s an interesting argument, but I’m not sure the whole syntax of the language stands or falls on the relative importance one assigns to object pronouns. Word order in English is largely standardized, but it’s not invariable. (Word order is more inflexible in Chinese languages, I think.) In the example you give, the meaning is clear, but on the whole I think inflection does add value in English, and I wouldn’t want to do without pronoun cases.
You know, I wonder sometimes if Ma Bunting knows she could have all these Tomato Nationals/minions at her disposal? I mean, Sars is irreplaceably awesome, of course, but Her Motherness? Is the business.
As my 10 year old says, “You always let the other person go first.” So “Me and Amy went bike riding” is wrong, while “Amy and me went bike riding” is right…right?
“Amy and I went bike riding.” “Amy and I” is the subject, so you need a subjective pronoun (“I”).
My mother spent my entire childhood (ok, up to 20) correcting my grammar. This led to a major in journalism, with a specialty in editing.
Now, in my second career, I get to correct my preadolescent students.
The greatest joy is being a 42-year-old daughter who gets to correct Mother Dearest (yes, that’s what I call her) at her slightest grammatical slip. Oh, joy, indeed!