<p>How many times have we heard educated teens (and adults) say, “Me and ____ went to ___________”? Ugh.</p>
<p>“Between you and I” is even worse!!! It comes off as trying to sound educated and proper, when it’s totally not. Whenever I hear someone improperly use the subjective pronoun for the objective I can’t help but inwardly cringe, and I can never think of them the same way again. “Me and ___” doesn’t bother me as much.</p>
<p>I still think that the “Me and ____” is worse because not only is it poor grammar but naming oneself first in a list is also wrong.</p>
<p>It’s bad grammar. Nothing rare or new about that.</p>
<p>who wants ice cream?</p>
<p>me</p>
<p>that’s how it starts,…you should have thought of this long ago when you still held the scoop but I bet you didn’t insist on proper grammar then, did you?
and even worse you rewarded them with Jerry and Ben’s!</p>
<p>coureur: </p>
<p>There is something new about it. In the past, poor grammar was not often found among the educated. Now, it’s commonplace.</p>
<p>Grammar changes over time. I can cite hundreds of examples from the 19th Century, including some from Dickens and Austen, that we would consider ungrammatical today.</p>
<p>Hey, there are some of my Quaker compatriots still stuck in “thees” and “thous”, even in uses of same that were ungrammtical in the 17th Century when they came up with it. </p>
<p>But I am glad some folks still cringe at the ungrammatical. It keeps editors like “myself” employed. Me, too! ;)</p>
<p>And this makes it SO much more difficult for me to teach Spanish. I even try diagramming in order for kids to see the function of an object in a sentence, and not worry about placement. BTW, this is upper level Honors Spanish, and it’s incredible how few can understand a subject pronoun. No longer can I say, “But you wouldn’t say ‘me and John are going…’” They look at me as though I were a fool. (a little subjunctive there, too, and boy, is that a difficult concept for these kids…) Anyway, I have had some kids tell me that they didn’t understand English grammar until they studied a foreign language. I remember that we drilled and drilled all this in elemntary school, and I know the Honors classes in jr. high had some grammar, but we don’t hit it as hard as we once did. Instead, they get more grammar in HS preparing for all those standardized tests, and by then their errors are so ingrained that it makes it difficult to correct them, and quite frankly, many of the kids don’t care. They think what they say is just fine, and we are just picky. My students get this look of “not again” and roll their eyes at me when they ask me if they “can” have something, I tell them they are physically capable of holding or using it. And I just sit there. They then ask if they “may.” But the looks and groans are palpable in the room. They do think it is a big joke, overall. They simply do not take grammar and proper use of vocabulary seriously.</p>
<p>Evitar, No they don’t. But they won’t forget what you are teaching them either. Since the rolling eyes are for their friends, in the end, you may win.</p>
<p>Grammar has been on the outs for awhile and it shows. But then I agree with Mini as well. Language is a restless beast. It is constantly changing.</p>
<p>What’s wrong with my grammar? She and me grampa are both in good health.</p>
<p>===</p>
<p>Evita, I often use the subjunctive very wickedly and nobody even notices. Sigh. It’s like a tree falling on a wit on the forest and nobody hears. Or something like that.</p>
<p>Mini: doest thee want a brick on thy head?</p>
<p>My husband uses constructions such as “He’s going with my son and I” all the time. This is a man with three (count them 3) college degrees. He insists the nuns taught him that this is correct. Who am I (a former editor with a zillion years of high school Latin) to tell him any differently?</p>
<p>“I even try diagramming in order for kids to see the function of an object in a sentence.”</p>
<p>Is diagramming taught anymore? As more of a math person, I liked diagramming----an orderly, logical way to learn (yuk) parts of speech…it’s a shame if it’s no longer used but I wouldn’t be surprised (are those of us who remember it showing our ages?).</p>
<p>I agree, “me and so and so going to…” doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as “between you and I” for the exact reason raindrop mentioned…unfortunately I wonder to myself how the person could have MISSED that rule in grade school, and what else did he miss??</p>
<p>
'Fraid so, 2331. But may I join you as another mourner at the demise of diagramming? I loved it and had a teacher who loved to get really deep and complicated with it. RIP.</p>
<p>Stay tuned, everyone, to see how long we even have a written English language anymore: u no wut im sayin?</p>
<p>me and my friends were talking about this yesterday!</p>
<p>When I hear, “Me and Andrew…”, I usually interrupt with “Andrew and I?” until “Andrew and I” starts the sentence. I have been doing this for years. Still do, even when the college kids are home on break!</p>
<p>College-level English teacher weighing in here, if you’ll accept that as a voice of authority: Relax about the subjective case as object of prepositions (“between you and I”). It’s proper British usage, and that may be why you hear it relatively frequently. Received dialect in the US uses the objective case in that position, yes.</p>
<p>Mini-lecture over. (I love this stuff!)</p>
<p>ctymom</p>
<p>HEY… what authority made the plural of the word fish into fishes?</p>
<p>Also… adding an extra “s” to possesives such as The Glasses’s Home?</p>
<p>I want to know who had the authority to make these changes.</p>
<p>mominva: </p>
<p>I correct my kids’ friends all the time… and they are learning (my kids already know…).</p>
<p>cnp… </p>
<p>I doubt that the nuns taught your dh to speak/write that way. For example: He’s going with John and me. Both sides of my family and my dh’s family were taught by nuns and we were always told to “test” the sentence by removing the word “John” and see how it sounds. A person wouldn’t say: “He’s going with I.”</p>
<p>Tell your dh to get in touch with Sister Mary Whoever and get straightened out.</p>
<p>You don’t sound too terribly serious, jlauer, but I think “fishes” is pretty archaic, if you really want to know. (A really good dictionary will usually tell you things like that.) For that “extra” s, it’s done or not, according to which style manual you’re using. Most these days are minimalist and so would skip the last s. Style manuals are the authority for some things. </p>
<p>Language usage itself is the slowly evolving authority that grates on so many people’s ears in most cases. It causes change over time, much more slowly in writing than in speech, and those of us who pay more attention to writing tend to dig our heels in.</p>
<p>As for removing the first term of a compound prep phrase, if you’re being taught to use objective case for the preposition “between,” it makes no sense to use that test, so the nuns very well might have taught cnp’s husband that usage for that particular preposition.
As I said, these things change over time and are different on different continents. Whether commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks is another example. It changed to ALWAYS inside in the US sometime after the mid-Twentieth Century, but it’s still done logically in the rest of the world. So there are still people around who were taught differently from what’s conventional usage today in this country. That doesn’t mean they were taught something wrong. The convention just changed here.</p>