Me and I are angry, me and I are sad
The exponential growth of I/me confusion is driving me nuts.
You hear it everywhere: “She gave it to he and I.” “Thanks for helping my son and I.” In conversations casual and formal, in real life and on TV, the cringe-inducing (to me) error has become so ubiquitous that to point it out to anyone would be churlish.
And yet here I am, doing so. Because it’s such a simple error to overcome. It nearly always goes in the direction of over-using the “I” rather than over-using the “me,” perhaps in an effort to sound more erudite and avoid the old “Him and me went to the store” (which you also hear on occasion).
And yes, sadly, I must say that I even heard it in Mitt Romney’s convention speech, in an otherwise moving passage:
But if you ask Ann and I what we’d give to break up just one more fight between the boys, or wake up in the morning and
discover a pile of kids asleep in a room — well every mom and dad knows the answer to that.
The thing about it is that the rule is actually so very simple. Just remove the other pronoun or name and the word “and,” and say the sentence without those things. I can’t imagine Romney ever saying “But if you ask I…”:
I know that language changes all the time. You might even say it evolves. But this change just doesn’t seem right to me.
Or to I.
[NOTE: And if this entry follows the rules of the usual nitpicky grammar post, I will have made at least one inadvertent grammar or spelling error in it.]
[ADDENDUM: The very worst example of this error I’ve ever heard occurred on the TV show “The Bachelorette,” (and yes, I sometimes watch it), when a contestant said something like, “Her and I’s relationship has gone to another level.”
Now, that’s creative.]
Couldn’t agree more! Also there’s no longer any confusion over “lying” and “laying” because, it seems, “laying” is always used and is usually wrong.
I will say, though, that although I know the I-me rule well, sometimes in the middle of a sentence I don’t quite figure it out fast enough.
I think I rank with Mike on the I-me rule.
I really hate the fewer-less confusion and probably a few others that I can’t think of right now. I can’t remember any grammar classes in HS, so I guess we were expected to get the basics by 8th grade. Of course, that was back in the paleolithic era when no one cared about my self esteem.
Neo, You and I are the same! 🙂
This drives me nuts and I’ve been bold and blunt enough to stop people in their tracks and say “too many pronouns” who did what now?
And they hate when I stop them but if you want me to HEAR and my object is to HEAR then be clear people!
Wow, have read your blog for years and years and never commented, but I could have written this post! At least I know I am not the only one–this trend drives me absolutely crazy, and you are correct that it is becoming more and more common, even among people who should know better!
Yes that’s a different topic, too many pronouns but people don’t even use the pronouns right.
That’s what she said. 🙂
Heh. I’ve with you on the I-me thing. Also with expat on the fewer-less aggravation as well. The other one that presently irritates me is the use of “more” instead of using the comparative form that simply adds an ‘er’ to an adjective. There are some places where it is appropriate – usually when you have two or more adjectives – but for the most part, it seems to me to be some sort of affectation of knowledge that is simply ignorance.
That’s what I think the I-me thing is, by the way. I remember being corrected as a child for using “me” when “I” was the correct form. I think that what has happened is that people have lost the ability to decide which one is correct and think that “I” is more “educated” sounding than “me” – so they use it, not understanding that they are still as mistaken as ever!
All this time I’ve been concerned about that usage, I thought it was just I.
Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi!
–
I have to agree with suek on this — I think using (or MISusing) “I” is frequently an attempt to sound more educated. My boss used to make the mistake often and I would correct her in the hope she would learn. Her and me don’t talk any more. (!)
This drives I nuts, too. I really would rather hear “Me and him went fishing,” which may have something to do with my rural southern roots–more accurately, “Me an’ him gone fishin'” At least these are colorful and in a sense natural–unselfconscious. Whereas “She gave it to he and I” is a self-conscious but badly mistaken attempt not to sound uneducated.
But it really seems that these are all lost causes in today’s educational and media environment. I’ve almost ceased to cringe at “I’m going to go lay down.” The big change is that people in positions where they would once have been expected to know better, e.g. journalists, do this stuff.
By the way: I would have to check, but I think I read “he and I” in a novel written in the early ’50s or so. It occurred in a letter written by one of the characters, an uneducated woman trying hard to be correct. So unless my memory is playing tricks on me (hardly impossible) it isn’t a brand new thing, though it’s certainly increasingly prevalent.
Grammar is like dance. One must know the basics but to learn the basics, one has to dance. Once the basics are learned and loved, individual work creates unique and valuable expression. The object is understood and knowledge increased and mysteriously, the subjective element of the creator does not detract, but add, to the understanding.
Grammar is life, thinking life. Using its rules, a writer forms a foundation which is flexible and enduring. With grammar as with God, if respect enters the picture, so can joy and fullness. Even as God is a great King that you shall approach according to the rules of Court, so grammar.
But one needs to participate. Like only a trained dancer can really appreciate and receive life long joy from the art (and wherein the power of the love seems to flow back into the dancer forming a trinity of subject, love, art), so everyone may partake of grammar, the unseen, little recognized, and often scorned soul of civilization.
This is my pet peeve. Well, I have several, but this is one of the tops. The other top one is news people who do not know how to use past tense. Everything happens in the present. Sorry folks, there is a past tense and I wish you knew how to use it.
BTW yesterday read an article saying who/whom war is over and who won. Whom is now obsolete, guess this is the only place left to use it and it should be wrong, but it IS the subject in the sentence.
My personal, drive-me-nuts, fingernails-on-the chalkboard examples are spelling “lose” with more than one “o” and the increasing number of people who seem to have no clue that words like lead, mislead, and plead have past tenses (such as led, misled, and pled).
Me couldn’t agree more, with the I/me problem, and with the fewer/less one as well. The who/whom fight is over, stopped by the ref.
The one that drives me nuts now is lose/loose. Only loosers get this one wrong.
The paradoxical part of many such blunders is that people [i]consistently[/i] make the wrong choice. They’d literally be better off flipping a coin. Or, alternatively, determine what their first impulse is, and then do the opposite. Then they’ll have the grammar nailed.
Oh, one other one. The feminist-inspired use of plural pronouns with singular verbs (“Will everyone take their seat?”) to avoid attribution of gender (as feminists see it; as the educated see it, the default use of the masculine pronoun implies nothing about the sex of the referenced person).
Lose/loose illustrates a problem I have living in Germany. Sometimes there i a German word similar to an English word, and after a while I become unsure of the correct spelling. I keep my Webster’s handy.
” I think I read “he and I” in a novel written in the early ’50s or so. ”
There’s nothing wrong with “he and I” – unless it’s used in the wrong place.
“He and I went to the Grand Canyon” is just fine. “They gave the grand prize to he and I” grates upon the grammatical nerves. The problem is that people think that “They gave the grand prize to me and him” sounds wrong – but it isn’t. It solves the problem to say “They gave the grand prize to us” – but people don’t equate the terms.
It’s the old subject and object thing. “He” and “I” are the subjective forms, “me” and “him” are the objective forms. If you don’t know what a direct or indirect object is, you probably don’t know which form to use.
and may I add to the list “aren’t I?” as in “I’m next aren’t I?”
As noted above, both this and the “I/me” misuse is IMO oftentimes attempt to appear eduated, or perhaps more acurately, sophistiated.
As comenters at this site know, the correct interrogative is “am I not?” as in “I’m next, am I not?”
No problem for me. That’s what 12 years of Catholic Education can do for you. The thought of a 200 lb nun boring down on you for incorrect grammar still scares the daylights out of me….hehehe.
That’s what a good education is for !! Oops I just ended that sentence in a preposition. Sorry Sister Marie.
Heh. Catholic education here as well. Except no 200 lb nun…my bete noir was Sister Imelda. 3 years – 8th grade, freshman year and junior year. We did not grow fonder of each other with each passing year.
She must have been all of 5’2 and weighed about 110 or so. Soaking wet in her voluminous habit.
Never laid a hand on anybody. Didn’t have to.
Truth be told – I didn’t understand English grammar until I took Latin. Then it made sense.
Although I resist the change, this is a reasonable argument, as put forth by Henry Hitchings: The Language Wars. (from a review by Joseph Epstein).
‘As an argument for why language not only changes but needs to change, Hitchings offers the example of the word everyone, a word that takes a singular pronoun, as in “Everyone is certain that he is correct.” The rise of female sensitivities in these matters has now forced one to write “Everyone is certain that he or she is correct,” or to alternate between “he” and “she” in the sentences that follow, or to lapse into the odious s/he. Why not, then, drop the rule, and where everyone is used revert to the plural pronouns they, them, their? The precedent for doing so is found in the works of great writers; Shakespeare, Fielding, Swift, Johnson, Byron, Ruskin, George Eliot, and Lewis Carroll, as Hitchings points out, availed themselves of plural pronouns in this connection. “Some usages,” he writes, “regarded as illiterate are really acts of discretion,” and this strikes me as one of them.’
A separate issue: ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Happy writing and speaking.
Jim
I don’t like it either, but it has been around for quite some time. From the entry for “I” in the online OED:
Used for the objective case after a verb or preposition when separated from the governing word by other words (esp. in coordinate constructions with another pronoun and and).
This has been common at various times (esp. towards the end of the 16th and in the 17th cent., and from the mid 20th cent. onwards); it has been considered ungrammatical since the 18th cent.1582 A. Munday Eng. Romayne Lyfe ii. 20 So after certaine familiar behauiour, vsed betweene him and I, he..went into the Refectorium.
1600 Shakespeare Merchant of Venice iii. ii. 317 All debts are cleerd betweene you and I.
1601 B. Jonson Every Man in his Humor v. i. sig. L2v, Musco has beene with my cosen and I all this day.
It is so good to have you write this and seeing so many feeling the same way, This problem is just getting worse and worse. I cringed when I heard Mitt Romney say it. I only had one local TV anchor respond to me that she realized it right after she said it but felt it would bring too much attention to it if she corrected it.
I enjoy when Judge Judy sometimes corrects the defendant or complaintant for making the object-subject mistake and waits for them to say it correctly.
It’s always so hard to believe how it is written into TV and movie scripts and said by people who are supposed to be smart.
Thanks for expressing your anger.
The bad grammar that really gets to me is using “seen” instead of “saw”. (I seen the dog running down the street.)
On the Internet, you often see misuse of “there” when “their” is appropriate and “your” instead of “you’re” when appropriate. I suppose these two may be spelling errors or just haste in writing instead of grammar mistakes but they still grate on me.
…and yes…Latin does really improve one’s understanding of English grammar. I think we’ve lost something by allowing learning Latin to become so rare.
Maybe it’s the flip side of the “This is…” dilemma.
You know what I’m talking about. Would you say “This is he,” for example, or “This is him”?
If you said “This is he,” although it sounds weird, you would be correct; since “is” funcitions as an “equality” operator between the two words “this” and “he,” the nominative case would be used, not the objective case, which would reslut in “This is him.”
Similarly, “It is I” is correct; “It is me” is not (and consequently, “It’s I” is correct).
My theory is that, having drummed into our heads that the nominative is correct for this case, it must be correct for the “John and…” case. So people use “John and I’ when they should be using “John and me.”
If we used “He talked to John and…,” we could solve the problem by taking the two “people” the speaker was talking to. “To John.” “To me (not to I).” Therefore “He talked to John and me” is correct.
And if we replaced John by a pronoun, the correct phrase is “He talked to him and me,” not “He talked to he and I” and not “He talked to me and him.”
Maybe simple trial and error could correct these problems.
(Incidentally, I came late to this, so please forgive me if someone else stated this earlier.)
Sometimes there is a German word similar to an English word
Ah, cognates. The bane of many a language student’s existence. Or source of entertainment. Like the American family driving down the Autobahn, and the kids giggling at the “Einfahrt” and “Ausfahrt” signs (“entrance” and “exit”).
In addition to the “I/me” confusion, here are a few others for the readers’ consideration: discreet/discrete; compliment/complement; their/they’re/there; it’s/its.
I agree that the study of Latin deepens one’s understanding of English grammar, but so does the study of other languages, even non-European ones, albeit more indirectly. When I studied, at various times, Arabic, Thai, and Indonesian, I learned something about English that I either hadn’t known before, or just hadn’t noticed.
Ranted about this to my daughter a night or two ago. I’m the House Director(mom) for a college sorority and have lots of young facebook friends. They are smart women, but every posted picture is of Suzy Q and I.
How is it they never learned this simple grammar?
Sigh. Just …sigh.
Irritating for sure, but the one that really slays me is using ‘bring’ instead of ‘take’. “I have to bring my car to the mechanic.” NO no no! You bring things here and take them there (away).
I, like Kathy, have read your blog for years and never commented. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this topic. I thought I was the only one left on the planet who was bothered by this misuse of pronouns. I do believe grammar is no longer emphasized in school, but since I home-schooled my three grown boys, I couldn’t say for sure. I did make my boys diagram sentences which I’m pretty sure is no longer taught.
suek, 4:41 yesterday: yes, of course, “he and I” is correct as the subject of a sentence. I venture to say that some form of plural pronoun subject can be found in most novels of any time. My point was that I think I read the usage we’re complaining about in a 60-year-old novel (in the mouth of a character, not the author).
It can get even more ridiculous: “Today is Scott and I’s anniversary!”
You will if Murphy is on the ball. And he usually is.
How about “could of” instead of “could’ve”? I see that written in Facebook comments all the time, which is rather troubling.