Why is it that people with poor grammar skills consistently confuse when to use 'I' and when to use 'me'?

Technically, “This is I,” is correct.

“He sent a telegram to my grandson and I” is not.

The really easy way to prevent this is to separate the double subject or object into two parts.

“Me went shopping.”

“He sent a telegram to I.”

I think that people misuse “I” because they’re trying very hard to speak (or write) correctly. To some ears (or eyes), “I” just seems classier and more dignified. Nobody would ever say “this is a picture of I,” but “this is a picture of my grandson and I” frequently slips out.

As for “Me and my wife,” I guess that’s just a large flag of poor grammatical skills.

“This is I” is correct? “This is a picture of I” is correct? You lost me on that one, Gail!

Well said, @SadieMartinPaul. I agree. They think it sounds classy. I just don’t get why they don’t accidentally get it right sometimes.

Do all languages have a first-person objective pronoun? I’m trying to wrack my brain to remember if it exists in Spanish (high school was too long ago.) We do have it in French (je versus moi), but I don’t know that the other Romance languages have a version.

As for native speakers consistently getting it wrong… you’ve got me; I have no clue.

“This is I” is technically correct, as I said.

“This is a picture of me” is a different grammatical structure.

“Soy yo”? I don’t know whether anyone would actually say that. We certainly say, “It’s me.” all the time, but it’s considered informal (and wrong by purists).

The “I” in “This is I” is a subjective complement, not an object. Subjective complements use the subject form of the pronoun.

The object of a preposition takes the object form the pronoun, hence “This is a picture of me.”

I think some people get it wrong due to overcorrection. Kids get corrected when they say “Me and him went to the store”, so they start saying things like “Between you and I” (which is wrong).

OMG! This is why me flat funked English in both HS and College, although I still managed to graduate with a 3.75 GPA!

¡¡¡ǝɥɔɐpɐǝɥ ɐ ǝɯ sǝʌıb ʇı ¡¡¡¡ɥsıןbuǝ ǝʇɐɥ ı

I never correct anyone’s grammar. First, that’s a rude, condescending thing to do. Second, as languages evolve, there’s plenty of disagreement, and seldom consensus, about right vs. wrong. Flip through several style guides, and you might find several different takes on the same subject. Third, I just might be the one who’s incorrect, and isn’t it doubly embarrassing to be both obnoxious and wrong?

I’m pretty sure all Indo-European languages distinguish between subject and object forms of pronouns. English is actually less inflected than other Indo-European languages.

I wonder if the confusion results partly from the decreasing importance of inflectional differences like this in English, which has been going on for centuries.

In that spirit, let me add that I was just stating the rule about subjective complements, not necessarily endorsing it. I think it would be pedantic to insist on “it’s I” over “it’s me”. But it’s not always easy to draw the line between mastery and pedantry.

You’re absolutely correct, @SadieMartinPaul, and as a longtime copywriter, I’ve watched my own grammar usage in my writing evolve over the years. But rules I learned early in school—and grammar was one of my best and favorite subjects—is hardwired in my brain, and I really wince when I hear, and I hear it a lot, errors like the one @Dutchess_III mentions and the incorrect use of words like effect/affect, infer/imply, and many, many others. It makes me especially crazy when I see grammar errors in TV and movie dialogue (the I/me thing pops up a lot) and in magazines and even books.

@Dutchess_III You mention that this individual is a friend from high school. How is it that you both went to the same school, but that your grammatical skills are so different? Did you pay extra attention and make a real effort to speak and write well? Or has your friend become grammatically sloppy over the years?

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room

Have you noticed that the conditional mood seems to be disappearing from written and spoken English? I’m constantly hearing, “If he was taller…,” instead of, “If he were taller…”

Same thing for the pluperfect. “The ground was wet because it rained,” rather than, “The ground was wet because it had rained.”

Then I guess Shakespeare had poor grammar.

Now Margaret’s curse in fall’n upon our heads,
When she exclaimed on Hastings, you, and I… – Shakespeare, Richard III, act 3, scene 3

all debts are cleared between you and I – Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, act 3, scene 2

Pronouns conjoined by “and” behave differently than single pronouns. Instead of dismissing it as “bad grammar”, why not investigate what’s going on?
http://ling.umd.edu/~tgrano/uht.pdf

@Dutchess_III would bet that they do “get it right” sometimes.

@SadieMartinPaul “was” and “were” have been used interchangeably in conditionals for about 300 years.

Why does it even matter?

edit: The thing is, people often excel in different areas. So where you might excel in areas where lingual arts are included, others might excel in the scientific and/or mathematical fields.

That is not to say that people should be completely ignorant towards the language, but I know I might sound a tad hypocritical, it’s not the end of the world,especially when such mistakes are quite common within the majority of non-specialist people. (Or at least I’m assuming they are??)

I have, however, recently noted misuse of the following pairs of words: of/off, to/too, that/who, whom/who.

PS: You know how most people say ‘ruler’ when they actually mean rule? I found it quite fascinating that such a large percentage of people use a word that means ‘dictator’ to describe an object used for scientific measurements.

Ciao.

@SadieMartinPaul. Absolutely. But since I had trouble with both those rules, I haven’t lost any sleep watching them fade. ;-)

I recommend the MWDEU entry on pronouns: http://books.google.ca/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&lpg=PA534&ots=nZtVphz2-3&dq=incentivize&pg=PA777#v=onepage&q&f=false

Object-position “X and I” occurs in educated writing. It can’t be due to hypercorrection because it dates back to Shakespeare at least.

Subject-position “X and me” is characteristic of some less educated speakers. But why should we hold informal spoken English to the same standards as formal written English?

@SadieMartinPaul says no one would say “this is a picture of I”. That’s right, we use object-position “I” only when it is conjoined, never by itself. This is evidence that the people who talk like this are following a rule – it’s just not the standard rule.

@morphail Shakespeare was the king of neologisms. As I mentioned earlier, a language is an ongoing process of change and evolution. Shakespeare happily played his role in pushing modern English along its path.

You’ve given us a link to a style/usage guide. But, that’s just one such guide; other sources might provide different “rules.” As your own source states, there are “many vexing usage problems” and cautions about “making generalizations.”

Please raise your hand if you were taught that you should never split an infinitive or end a clause or sentence with a preposition. Please give yourself extra credit if you’ve read these things in Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” In 1910, certain grammarians were trying to impose the rules of Latin on English, a language with a Germanic structure; hence, the rules.

By the way, we’re all better at grammar than we even realize. For example, English has an order for prenominate adjectives—quantity, opinion, size, shape, age, color, origin, material. A native English speaker doesn’t think about the order, which is rather rigid, but just naturally uses it. An English-speaking person wouldn’t say “an old brick little nice house.” The order is so ingrained, the person would say “a (quantity) nice (opinion) little (size) old (age) brick (material) house.

So, if no “perfect” exists in universe of grammar, maybe “good” is a reasonable standard.

@SadieMartinPaul I agree with your second paragraph, and it’s the same sort of unconscious rule that governs why we say “this is a picture of my friend and I” and not “this is a picture of I”.

I’m skeptical that Shakespeare created all these words that people thought he created. If he used object-position “X and I”, it’s because object-position “X and I” was part of the language at the time.

Oh, that drives me nuts, in particular the incorrect use of the nominative case of the pronoun among the objects of a preposition. e.g.
– They’re shipping one out to her and I today ( to her, to me !).
– The card is signed from Ed, Hannah, and he ( from them, not they!).

What bugs me the most about it is that it compromises my expectations that the speaker/writer has paid close attention to what they mean to express.
And sometimes calls into question whether or not the speaker/writer even knows what they mean.

@dabbler I don’t see how it shows that the speaker/writer doesn’t know what they mean. The meaning of “They’re shipping one out to her and I today” is completely clear. There’s no other way to interpret that “I” other than object of the verb.

@morphail It’s just an instinctual opinion on my part, I admit, that an incorrect usage can indicate sloppiness – not abiguity. I’ll agree it’s probably not ambiguous.
And what if that were expressed ‘incorrectly’ intentionally to mean something? That opportunity for specificity in the language is forfeited by sloppy intention.

That particular example, I’ll agree, does not call into question whether or not the speaker/writer knows what they mean.

Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English.
Like Gresham’s law, bad grammar drives out good. These days I routinely hear wrong pronouns in movie & tv dialog, not intended as substandard vernacular. Either the writers don’t know or don’t care.

@dabbler I don’t think any opportunity for specificity is forfeited. If someone wants to express something, they will find a way of doing so. This reminds me of the argument that if people confuse “flaunt” and “flout” we’ll lose the ability to express the difference between “display ostentatiously” and “refuse to obey” – but of course we won’t, I just expressed the difference.

Woll eyel haav yu kno i kin kownt tu twhenti iv i uz me toz tu.

Me don’t know.

“You is Kind, You is Smart, You is Important”

Because it isn’t always straightforward. You can teach that “I” is used as a subject and subject complement and “me” is used as an object and that will work most of the time, and will conform to standardized forms of grammar, but even then, sometimes the forms are used in different places. The pronouns are the only example in English of words that have different forms for the objective case. But in many European languages, an objective case of some sort is used in other constructions, like exclamations, thus “Poor me!” not “Poor I!” even though “me” is not an object in that example.

Other examples:

Me, I’m going out.
Who wants to go? – Me.

“me” is not an object in these cases.

The notion of grammatical correctness is cultural. There is no objective correctness for grammar. It’s just a convention, and grammar nazis try to make everyone do it their way. They argue that it makes things easier if we all follow the same rules. And sure it does. The question is, which rules should become the universal rules, and who has the power to make them universal?

So certain people take it upon themselves to make the rules they choose be the universal ones. Remember, it’s just the rules they choose. There is no objective reason why any one set of rules should be correct. In reality, people vote with their feet. What people use the most becomes defacto correct, no matter what any group of grammar police might try to enforce.

Most of us just use the grammar that makes intuitive sense to us. And the amazing thing is that, for the most part, we understand each other. We even can make sense out of non-native speakers of the language. But do we want to?

The people who think they have the right of it get to exert power in trying to enforce their version of grammar. And most of the fights we have here are really about people insisting they are right because they are smarter and they are more literate and they are members of the in club.

People who aren’t in the in club get pissed off and may or may not try to fight back. But mostly grammar police are out to hurt people’s feelings, only they get to feel righteous about it because they are, after all, being school marms (and I think it is mostly women who do this—so it is part of the civilization battle, as well).

I do like to be able to understand people. But I understand that it is my choice to reach out to those who don’t speak the language the way an educated person does or to try to make uneducated speakers feel bad about themselves. I prefer to try to make people who have an attitude about grammar feel bad about themselves. It’s an elitist and unkind thing to do. Most of them do it in a nasty way. If people really cared about how uneducated people speak, they would be kinder and do the grammar correction in private, instead of trying to humiliate people publicly.

This question is an attempt to humiliate people. Of course, they are unnamed, but lots of people will feel shamed by it. Which is a shame. Of course the OP will say there is no such attempt, and maybe she really believes that. I find it sickening and mean and even though fluther rules call for good grammar, I do not think they call for us to point out people’s mistakes in public. It is a private thing for the moderators to take care of.

If this were a real question, it would be about the proper use of I and me, or something like that. There would be no “poor grammar skills” in the question. That is just picking on certain unnamed people and it is mean. No two ways about it.

“Me, I want to go out” is elliptical for “As for me, I want to go out.” Object of a preposition.
“Who wants to go out?” The proper response is, “I do!”

On subjective complements, it’s different in French: “L’etat, c’est moi.”

The prescriptive/descriptive conflict is ultimately decided on rhetorical and pragmatic grounds, not grammatical (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that grammar and rhetoric are continuous). What works, works. If your speech conveys denotation adequately but leads your listeners to mark you in some undesirable way, it doesn’t really work.

@SadieMartinPaul I didn’t correct his grammar. As I said in the details, it wasn’t so much a criticism as a curiosity.

I’ve had my grammar corrected before. I’m always grateful for it. I’d rather be told my zipper is down, than not being told and continuing to make a fool of myself.

Also, I didn’t know him that well in school, so I don’t know if he’s always been sloppy or if it’s been getting worse. Could be that my parents corrected me often and his didn’t.

@gailcalled, just for fun, I can confirm that “Soy yo” is correct; “Soy mi” is not. Same as traditional ingles. “Dame” (give it to me) is correct, “Dayo” doesn’t exist. Spanish hasn’t fallen into these style shifts.
This particular construction shift began occurring within a subset of my friends about fifteen years ago; before that it didn’t exist. But slowly a few of my friends and lots of my acquaintances began using the “Donnie and me went downtown and Stella of all people walked up and hugged both Donnie and I” configuration. I am pretty convinced that this is a style thing. Like@sadiemartinpaul suggests, I expect the “she hugged Donnie and I” thing did start out because it sort of vaguely sounded more correct even though it wasn’t; and maybe the “Donnie and me enjoyed the show” is a kind of downtalking that offsets the perceived superiority, that is, the perceived snottiness, of the other error.
How about that analysis? xoxoxo

Whew! GA @susanc!

@submariner I’m very suspicious of grammatical analyses that depend on words that aren’t there.

@susanc the “she hugged Donnie and I” thing did not start out because of hypercorrection. It’s been part of English since at least the 1600s. The earliest formulations of the rule against it arose in the 1800s. Before the 1800s, no one was breaking a rule when they said “she hugged Donnie and I” because there was no rule to break.

@submariner‘s analysis is correct, or at least a reasonable justification for the use of me in the first case, and a correct illumination of the reason it’s wrong in the second case.

@morphail “suspicious of grammatical analyses that depend on words that aren’t there” – that’s the way it’s done, and it’s reliable to determine the correct usage per the grammer rules.
What’s a better way to analyse grammar questions in sentences like that?

‘Common usage’ is a fine analysis if you’re throwing out the grammar rules, but know that’s what you’re doing.
The difference is between “what’s the grammatically correct usage?” and “what’s sounds ok?”
The answer to the first is deterministic, and the answer will be the same no matter who applies the rules or where they learned the language, it’s a matter of knowing the actual grammar rules for English language.
While the answer to the second depends where you learned the language, and the answer is reliably correct only in that context.

@dabbler It’s not just about where you learn the language, though, it’s also about when. “The rules” have been different in the past and they will change in the future.

Also, “words that aren’t there” might explain where that usage came from, but in the sentence “Me, I’m going out”, “me” is not being used as an object of a preposition. It’s being used as a topic-marker.

Did you not answer your own question?

…because they’re “grammatically challenged.”

That’s like asking, “Why do doctors stick people with needles?” Because they’re doctors, and that’s what doctors do.

I still agree with @submariner‘s analysis:
’“Me, I want to go out” is elliptical for “As for me, I want to go out.” Object of a preposition.’
[ Or: “Look at me. I want to go out” It’s a narcissistic usage. ]
I never heard of a ‘topic-marker’ among any serious English grammar rules. If you are explaining the common usage, sure, ‘me’ is a topic-marker. But it’s not correct formal usage.

What I mean is that in the sentence “Me, I’m going out”, “me” is being used as a topic-marker. It’s setting the stage for the sentence—explaining what it is going to be about. The phrase “as for me” has the same effect. We don’t have an actual topic-marking particle like in Japanese, but some English phrases are used in a similar manner.

@dabbler “What’s a better way to analyse grammar questions in sentences like that?”

By examining the evidence. In “Me, I’m going out”, “me” is not the subject, and it’s not the object. Saying that it’s the object of an invisible preposition seems like an attempt to make the data fit the theory. It seems more reasonable to conclude that “me” is a disjunctive pronoun, similar to French “moi” as in “moi je vais”.

Grammar is not something that is unchanging across all speech communities and dialects. In order to figure out the rules of a certain dialect, you examine how that dialect is used. You don’t try to apply the rules of a different dialect, or the rules that you think the dialect should have.

“Topic marker” is a common term in linguistics.

@morphail, I am so glad we have you with us.

“Me” is never a topic marker. Is it a topic in “Me, I’m going out”? Maybe, but I can’t imagine anybody actually saying “Me, I’m going out” unless it was offering some sort of emphatic contrast. “I’m staying in.”—“Me, I’m going out.” So there may be some sort of ellipsis there. I’m not saying English doesn’t have disjunctive pronouns or uses of me that are not objects, but I’m not sure “Me, I’m going out” is an example of that. “Poor me” may be.

The French example is not the same. French phonology has fewer levels of stress, so sometimes French uses repetition for emphasis in cases where English might use accentuation. “Moi je sort” could mean ”I ‘m going out”, not necessarily “Me, I’m going out”.

The Shakespeare examples give some reason to think that “between you and I” is not overcorrection (or was not in his day), but no reason to stop telling students to write “between you and me.” The literary merit of Shakespeare does not make his work authoritative on questions of contemporary English grammar and usage.

@submariner I think the French usage is contrastive in the same way as the English.
“Everyone else is staying in. Me, I’m going out.”
It might be more common to emphasize “I”: ”I’m going out”, but “Me, I’m going out” is an option.

The reason I quoted Shakespeare was to show that it wasn’t solely due to hypercorrection. I did not mean to suggest that Shakespeare’s usage means we should use it in whatever context we want.