Priorities, Priorities - the Cindy Sheehan situation

Who would want to be between martin and you?

 

Have you ever heard of capital letters, chief? They teach it in the first grade.

 

I can find anything on Google.

yourDictionary.com

"The difference between "I" and "me" in English is the difference between the function of a Subject or Object in a sentence. The Subject of a sentence is what the sentence is about and for that reason is usually the first noun or noun phrase in the sentence. It usually occurs before the verb, "I like Fernando," and never after it, "Fernando likes I."

"Me" is the Object form of "I," just as "him" is the Object form of "he." The Object form is used after the verb but also after prepositions: "Fernando likes me" or "Fernando likes working with him."

As we saw above, we cannot use "I" and "me" randomly; we must observe its function in the sentence. This applies to all the personal pronouns.

Coordinated noun constructions like "you and I" change nothing. It is equally incorrect to say "Me worked late" and "Maureen and me worked late." And it is equally incorrect to say "Fred looked at I" and "Fred looked at Maureen and I." So why do we say things like "Fred saw Maureen and I"?

A common ungrammatical dialectal construct in U.S. English is "Me and Maureen ate all our kohlrabi." Grammarians who try to write rules for language rather than describe the ones that are already there, "prescriptive grammarians," found two problems with such constructions. First, the Subject contains an Object pronoun: "me." Second, the placement of "me" before the name of someone else was at one time considered impolite. Of course, politesse has nothing to do with grammar, that is, what is right or wrong in speech.

The result is that prescriptive grammar books used in U.S. schools for years have taught children to avoid constructions like "me and X" in favor of "X and I," where "X" represents any other noun or pronoun referring to a human being. They seldom make clear that this rule applies only in the Subject position. The critical grammatical rule, that "I" appears only in the Subject while "me" must be used in all Object positions gets lost in the concern for etiquette.

Young people in the U. S. have been so exposed to this oversimplified explanation of the "me-and-you" problem, that about 20 years ago U. S. English-speakers began switching "me and X" to "X and I" everywhere the phrase occurs—in Subject and Object positions. When actors and others on TV and radio began speaking with this error, it spread like wildfire."


Editors have caught me on this before. My grade school teachers were very big on politeness. So it's not my fault, I'm a victim of Louisiana public school education. :grin: