Small grammar peeve becomes rant...

[azurelunatic]

You may not know who you are. But you're out there. You may be perfectly innocuous users of the English language, and normally never trip my GHA! filters. Until ... the lurking horror.

I'm talking, of course, about the compulsive use of you and I.

"What?" one of you might say. "I thought it was supposed to be like that!" Actually, no, not always.

For the sake of politeness, one is supposed to put the other party first and one's self last, yes. But sometimes "you and I" is the right phrasing, and sometimes it is "you and me".

How to test it? Take out them, and just leave oneself.
I never thought this would happen! can therefore safely become You and I never thought this would happen!, but I never thought this could happen to me! must become I never thought this could happen to you and me!

Comments

[ywalme.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I thought I was the only one who cared any more.

(Of course, I compulsively use 'one' as an alternative when I don't feel like arguing with people over which is correct, after having mentally checked over exactly the trick you mention.)

[azurelunatic]

You have perhaps arrived later than the regular grammar-bitch entries.

I actually lost some friends over those.

Mainly, the ones I was screaming about.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

One agrees, but thinks that the use of 'one' is sometimes very silly.

[azurelunatic]

One has not yet been tied down and read to like a D'Angeline, has one.

[grifyn.livejournal.com]

So of course I assume that it was a post of mine.

[azurelunatic]

Actually, no. :)

Though you are one of the people who I wouldn't suspect of having lurking grammar flaws, so if something popped up, I wouldn't be armored against it by an expectation that a knowledge of writing is not part of the journalist's life, as with evealone (who is a friend from college)

[grifyn.livejournal.com]

Though you are one of the people who I wouldn't suspect of having lurking grammar flaws

Why? (Just wondering.)

My sense of the grammatic is mostly intuitive. I often end sentences with prepositions and sometimes I split infinitives, but I usually catch myself and correct it. The "you and I"/"you and me" thing is something I'm never quite sure of, though I think I use them correctly just because they sound "right" the correct way, and not because I consciously know them to be right.

My poor English-teaching foster mother... she tried so hard.

[azurelunatic]

Just because you're not one to be making the errors. Since I'm another intuitive-grammar person, seeing Bad Things done to the language makes me literally flinch, cringe, wince, grimace, twitch, et cetera. (Though not as much, anymore. It used to be bad.) So I associate people who typically do those things to the language with "people who cause pain to me", and I'm very good about remembering who those people are.

My parents were good about teaching me to speak properly, mostly by example and correction. (I'm doing the same thing for Little Fayoumis.) I can't name the grammatical rules that are associated with "I know this is wrong", always, but I know how it sounds when it's right.

[literaltruth.livejournal.com]

*grins* I've just taught this to a bunch of Chinese teenagers.

If you want to know why - it's because "I" is a subject pronoun (i.e. it gets used as the subject of the sentence only) whilst "me" is an object pronoun (i.e. it only gets used as an object).

So, "I do things" but "Things happen to me".

You is both an object and a subject pronoun ("You do things" and "Things happen to you").

So - "You and I do things" whilst "Things happen to you and me".

Simple.

Now I'm off to plan lessons on Present Perfect tense (which is obviously really, really easy in a country whose native language arguably doesn't have any tenses never mind Perfect ones) and Perfect Modals (which are just dull). Oh and also a review of colours, numbers, random objects and "What's this / that?"/"It's a(n)...".

[azurelunatic]

Ah. That makes sense.

I used to play with the passive voice when I was a teenager, mostly to remove the actor from a relating of stupid actions.

[stronae.livejournal.com]

Yay, subjective vs. objective case!

[boojum.livejournal.com]

One of the most useful grammatical tools I learned in middle school was how to simplify sentences. Both this sort of grammatical simplification and negation simplification[1] have been useful to me. I'm not sure whether I was taught them or not, but I intend to teach them and some form of basic sentence diagramming to any kid of reasonable age I get my hands on.

(By the way, the way to teach sentence diagramming seems to be to challenge kids to complexity wars and penalize them for sentences that don't make sense. My parents were pissed at my teacher for exacerbating my pre-existing tendency to make run-on sentences.)

[1] "If it hadn't been the case that she was unlikely to forget that I'd asked her not to do many of them..."

[azurelunatic]

I can figure that out. Sort of. Which is why I went into CS.

[amberfox.livejournal.com]

This is why I tend to just use 'us' or 'we'; more people know how to use those correctly.

[nalidoll.livejournal.com]

bless you for posting this!

heh. it was my last-week's grammar peeve. i think i drove everyone nuts..

of course, half the time i get so frustrated i end up in the "if you can't beat 'em" catagory.

my four year old is the only one who pays much attention, of course.
(this week's lesson with her has been repeating my mother's oft used phrase "bread gets done, people finish" when she announces she is through with something.)

[azurelunatic]

I never learned that one...