“Say what?”
I’m here to stand up for the little guy. Poor “me“! In contemporary speech, this first person objective pronoun is often left out, cast off, and upstaged in current everyday American speech.
Today in any typical conversation, one is apt to hear statements like, “Give the money to Jason and I.”, or “That’s the best choice for my husband and I.”, or perhaps, “The cat really likes Lukas and I.” Or whatever combination of possibilities may exist without the dreaded “me”.
All of the above sentences are gramatically incorrect. If you removed “Jason”, “husband”, and Lukas. you would be saying “Give the money to I”. “That’s the best choice for I”, and “The cat really likes I.” These sentences are not grammatical. They sound “funny”. If you spoke these sentences, people would give you a quizzical look with a, “say what?” response.
The correct pronoun in these sentences would be “me” because it is the object of the action in the statement – after a verb or after a preposition. But often people substitute “me” for “I”. So why do we avoid “me”? If you ask the average speaker why they think that is, they are likely to say that people don’t know which pronoun to use.
But I maintain that there is a deeper reason to drop “me” and it reveals a current state of mind in our culture. The answer is simple. Because it sounds common. If we use “me”, we have an uneasy feeling that we are unrefined, ignorant. There’s an unspoken code that says “I” is formal, delicate, not heavy. We don’t dare to sound uneducated when we are unsure which pronoun to use. We think of “me” as the supervillain. Run away in terror. But he’s really our friend. Where did the little guy come from anyway?
Modern English is developed from Early Modern English (1500 – 1700), Middle English (1100 – 1500) and Old English (5th century – 1100). Old English was part of the West Germanic branch of the Indo European language which originated in eastern Europe and Asia. “Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.” 1
The West Germanic Old English language gave rise to what is now contemporary English and we can see the roots of many familar words in that ancient tongue. The bread and butter, meat and potato words of English include prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns. Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. 2
What did “me” look like back in the 5th century? In the singular, involving one individual, “me” is a first person pronoun having to do with self. Second person is the person you are addressing – you. Third person is everyone else – he, she, it.
Singular First person pronouns in Old English were: ich, me, min, me. They were as follows:
Nominative or the Subject of the sentence “I” was ich (sounded like “each”)
Accusative or the Direct Object in the sentence was me (sounded like “may”)
Genetive or Possessive was min (sounded like “mean”)
Dative or Indirect Object was me (sounded like “may”)
Good old “me” – at the ready since the dark ages.
“Me” is helpful. Keeps things clear. Launching the sentence? Nope, taking the hit of the action.
So, let’s put “me” back in circulation like a comfortable, old couch. Afterall, it’s been around for 2,000 years, older than “I”. A trusted companion. And remember, https://youtu.be/0hG-2tQtdlE?si=yHgreU3L3D-C1Ll6
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