I seem to have wandered into more, as Daffy Duck once had it, “pronoun trouble.”
This time it wasn’t about they, but me. Or I. In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote this phrase: “Were me and my students missing something?” A lot of people didn’t like that, insisting that the proper rendition would have been: “Were my students and I missing something?” And to think that I’m a linguist, to boot — o tempora, o mores!
I’m aware of this “rule.” However, my being a linguist is much of why I often flout it. The idea that pronouns must be in what is termed their subject form whenever they are used as subjects seems so obvious, and yet it is just something some people made up not too long ago. It isn’t how English works from a scientific perspective.
Here’s why: If I say “You and me know,” I will be told that I should have said “You and I know” because I is the subject form. OK, but why does it feel so clumsy to say “I and you know”? After all, I is the subject here, too. You might say that it’s rude to put yourself, the I, first. But think about it: “I and you know” doesn’t feel just impolite; it feels just plain off, as if you were newish to the language. This is evidence that matters are not as simple as I being what one always must use as the subject.
There’s more evidence: You do something, and someone asks who did it. You raise your hand and say “Me.” But if what you mean is “I did it,” where I would be the subject, then why don’t you raise your hand and say “I”? Or if others did it, why wouldn’t you point at them and say “They!” instead of “Them!”?
You might propose that when you say “Me!” it’s short for “It was me!” Possible, but if so, note that according to the blackboard rules, even that is wrong, because me in that case isn’t an object. Supposedly, you’re to say “It was I.” But you wouldn’t. And note that things are now really confusing.
What kind of rule are we dealing with?
One that was, if not made up by, then at least hectoringly perpetuated by 19th-century naïfs who appointed themselves as arbiters of “proper” English usage for the class-conscious Anglophone bourgeoisie. The first declaration that I am aware of — after consultation with the linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade — that subjects must always be expressed by subject pronouns is an imperious 1826 volume called “The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected.” (Subtitled “with Elegant Expressions for Provincial and Vulgar English, Scots, and Irish; for the Use of Those Who Are Unacquainted With Grammar.” Whose general tone, surely, you can glean.) Amid its deeming sentences with object pronouns as subjects “ungrammatical,” it also gleefully declares that we are to say things such as “It may be we” and “It seems to have been he.” Are we really to accept this kind of counsel as authoritative?
The reality of English is this: There’s nothing erroneous about saying “You and me know,” quite in spite of the fact that you indeed would not say “Me know.” The way English actually works is the following.
1. One uses only I when it is adjacent to the verb (or separated from it by an adverb or the like: “I soon found out”). But before or after a conjunction, one may use either I or me: “You and me know”; “Me and you know.” This is true of subject versus object forms of he, she, we and they, as well: “You and him know”; “Her and me know.”
2. We also often use I after and in prepositional phrases, most notoriously with between. Hence, “It happened between you and I” rather than “It happened between you and me.” It is often supposed that people say “between you and I” out of misunderstanding proper usage and thinking the rule is simply: Always say “and I.” But writers were saying “between you and I” long before anyone had come up with the “don’t say ‘you and me know’” rule. Shakespeare used “between you and I,” for example, in “The Merchant of Venice.” English speakers simply sense I as OK when it sits a certain distance from the preposition, such as after a pronoun plus an and.
Someone assigned to document how English grammar works who was completely unfamiliar with the language would find this pronominal usage intricate, not broken. The idea that the rule is something as elementary as that you always use the subject form as a subject and always use the object form as an object just isn’t the way Modern English has ever been spoken.
After all, when you learn other languages, do you expect them to be that tidy? In French, using the subject pronoun I before or after and isn’t even allowed: “John and I know” is never “Jean et je savons.” In some languages, pronouns often elude perfect logic: In Russian, you don’t say “Me and my wife” (whoops, “My wife and I”) but “We and the wife.” And life goes on.
In my experience, my pushing this point sometimes genuinely irks, and even occasionally angers people. I recall a man in an audience I spoke to who was so fumingly insistent that the subject must always be expressed with I that he seemed to almost want to fight me.
But there is no need here for fisticuffs. I am not calling for us to give up the “you and I know” form entirely. It will live eternally: It is, perhaps, the one made-up blackboard grammar rule that has become such an established and rigorously policed habit that it pretty much qualifies as natural language (unlike “It is I,” which has never truly caught on).
Yet this rule is, in the end, a concoction. It is one of many such rules (like saying you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition) created by people who, among other now outdated concerns, wanted English to be more like Latin, under an impression that Latin was an especially majestic language because of its association with a celebrated classical past. They meant well, but modern linguistics did not exist yet, and in terms of grammar expertise, they were old-time naturalists as compared to modern biologists.
So, while we must learn this rule as a custom, we should also be aware that the rule, like many customs, makes no more sense logically than the fact that oaky-tasting chardonnay went out of fashion after the 1990s. To wit: “You and me know” is not illogical and thus not a sign of sloppy thinking any more than saying “I’m late, aren’t I?” is illogical because you would never say “I are late.” Quirky subject, this.
And that is why I wrote “Were me and my students missing something?” One’s patience with the arbitrary can wear thin. I also continue to seek out oaky chardonnays.
Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever” and “Woke Racism.”
"need" - Google News
October 23, 2021 at 03:41AM
https://ift.tt/3m3mdP1
Opinion | You and Me Need to Talk - The New York Times
"need" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3c23wne
https://ift.tt/2YsHiXz
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Opinion | You and Me Need to Talk - The New York Times"
Post a Comment