That said, "Tom and myself" may be a notch up the scale from the "Me and Tom went to the movies" usage which (for some mysterious reason) infected boatloads of student narratives in the term just closed. I'm going to drop narratives from my spring term syllabus. Do these folks actually need practice writing informal essays when half of them can't produce complete sentences or develop coherent explanations?
Me and Tom is the spontaneous form in many English dialects, arguments about pronoun case notwithstanding. This may be why people struggle to cope with the formal rule, especially in spontaneous speech, and over-correct to using the Tom and I form as object as well as subject.
Stephen Pinker had some good stuff on this IIRC. Even Shakespeare did it apparently - the phrase "between you and I" occurs in Merchant of Venice.
Classical music is [...] less instant than popular music. You have to listen to it properly. Popular music constantly borrows from classical.
My understanding is that "classical music" was merely popular music from a different era.
As for "listening to things properly", if you think there is a lack of nuance to be divined from modern music, then perhaps you're not listening to it properly.
And, for the mindless consumers among us, it may surprise you to comprehend that all acts of creation borrow from earlier work. Classical music was nothing if not finessed echoes of earlier works, to evoke an emotional conversation with the past. This is true for all works of art, feats of engineering, and even forum posts.
So it goes.
I never said pop music isn’t nuanced. Trust me I know it is. Pop music is made to listened to in short burst, most song lasting roughly 3 mins. There are uses of modes to make them more interesting and various other musical devices, but essentially they are packages of music that need to get their meaning across in a short time.
Art music uses longer forms to get its meaning across. By its very nature it plays with music in a mor complicated way. The longer format allows the composer to develop their ideas more. They are made to be listened two and don’t work as well when used as background music as pop music
As the late science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon declared, "ninety percent of everything is crap." The older forms of music (and literature, and visual arts) have had time for the crap to be sifted out, and what remains is usually pretty good. Contemporary music (and literature, and visual arts) have not yet had that benefit. Give them time.
In the same vein, I am hearing more and more incorrect usage of "myself". As in, "Myself and my nephew were witness to the horrible car wreck on Alaskan Way two nights ago." I see this so much now and it always makes me grind my teeth. Whatever happened to "My nephew and I were witness to the horrible car wreck...". If I point this out when I see it in print, I almost always get called a "grammar Nazi". God forbid we hold others to correct sentence structure. I suppose people think they sound smarter by speaking this way...to me, they just sound idiotic.
Yes, I've noticed that too. I suspect the speakers feel insecure about having to choose between "I" and "me" and hope that "myself" will let them off the hook.
I think it's not that either. It's a desire to add more gravitas which it is deemed I and Me cannot adequately convey.
Ugh. The word "Myself," used in that context, always makes me shudder.
It does me too, but it's not actually a surprising development. English lacks a series of reinforcing or emphatic pronouns - although in northern England we use phrases like "I love sausages, me", but that's not found in the South. French can use "moi, je...".
I hear a similar usage around here: “She doesn’t like sausages, but me, I love them.”
I suppose the alternative would be "on the other hand." "She doesn't like sausages, but I, on the other hand, love them."
That said, "Tom and myself" may be a notch up the scale from the "Me and Tom went to the movies" usage which (for some mysterious reason) infected boatloads of student narratives in the term just closed. I'm going to drop narratives from my spring term syllabus. Do these folks actually need practice writing informal essays when half of them can't produce complete sentences or develop coherent explanations?
That’s what I was getting at with my earlier comment. A speaker may be fully aware that “Me and Tom” is incorrect and that “Tom and I” is correct, but he doesn’t want to say that out loud because he suspects his mates would make fun of him for speaking posh. “Myself and Fred” has the attraction that it’s not as obviously wrong as “Me and Fred” and at the same time it doesn’t sound unacceptably pedantic or posh.
Suffolk dialect of the 20th century: "har oon't speak t'th loikes o'we". Ignoring the vocab differences, the crucial bit is at the end, "she won't speak to the likes of we". Some dialects generate the nominative, I, she, he, etc., in object position, it may be dying out. I know an exaggerated Bristol accent has, "ee sees oi, an' oi sees ee", again I in object position.
Sorry: this just popped into my head from somewhere: "He whomst thou lovest . . . " John? King James? Is this some archaic way of dealing with the object of a phrasal predicate (or something)?
Well, I just searched with Duck Duck Go, and it's a little more complicated than that.
Many sites say it's just a made-up word. Others say it's an Internet meme. However, Wiktionary has this:
1. (now chiefly Internet slang and humorous) Nonstandard form of who or whom.
1884 William Reid, Romance of song; or, The muse in many moods, page 63:
May I embrace him on the Further Shore,
Where thy tumultuous tide shall never rise
To overwhelm thy fated pilgrims more,
Whomst thou, sad sea, unto the Lord shalt yet restore.
1892, Bret Harte, Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine:
"Squaire, whomst did you say were a-hangin' arfter you ?" he asked without advancing a step.
1983, Joel Chandler Harris, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, compiled and edited by Richard Chase, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN, page 762:
All an' simely, whichever, an' whoever, an' wharsomever, speshually de howcome an' de whatshisname, de 'fo' said, flainter an' flender, le' 'im come headfo'most inter de court-house, whar de high she'ff an' de low kin lay 'im down an' flatten 'im out; all whomst she mought consarn.
Never mind; it's Fake News, an Internet invention intended to convey irony. But it does raise the unholy (and apparently confusing) specter of slinging "who" and "whom" about as though interchangeable.
Never mind; it's Fake News, an Internet invention intended to convey irony. But it does raise the unholy (and apparently confusing) specter of slinging "who" and "whom" about as though interchangeable.
Again, in UK English my experience is that whom is almost entirely absent from the spoken language and optional in writing. Because it's mostly only found in formal writing, it's sometimes reanalysed as a formal form of who, hence spreading into subject position.
It also seems unable to stand as a direct object separated from its preposition; hence
Who are you writing to?
And
To whom are you writing?
Are both possible, whereas:
To who are you writing?
Whom are you writing to?
Are both somewhere odd.
The formality of whom seems to correspond to the formality of keeping the preposition in front of the pronoun, rather than treating it as part.of a verbal phrase.
Never mind; it's Fake News, an Internet invention intended to convey irony. But it does raise the unholy (and apparently confusing) specter of slinging "who" and "whom" about as though interchangeable.
Again, in UK English my experience is that whom is almost entirely absent from the spoken language and optional in writing. Because it's mostly only found in formal writing, it's sometimes reanalysed as a formal form of who, hence spreading into subject position.
It also seems unable to stand as a direct object separated from its preposition; hence
Who are you writing to?
And
To whom are you writing?
Are both possible, whereas:
To who are you writing?
Whom are you writing to?
Are both somewhere odd.
The formality of whom seems to correspond to the formality of keeping the preposition in front of the pronoun, rather than treating it as part.of a verbal phrase.
This is UK English; YMMV.
I feel the same way. Starting a sentence with "whom" sounds barbaric. Your examples are exactly what sounds right to my ear; switching it, as you show, sounds wrong.
Sounds like it was a joke. It's not in the print OED, nor in the Merriam-Webster online Unabridged, so I'm going to guess it was slang, and never gained the currency it requires to be listed in the dictionary, and then was resuscitated (or coined anew) in the internet age. In other words, it's not part of some honest-to-gosh dialect, but is a barbarism rightly denounced.
"You gave my priceless heirloom to whom?" works fine, no recasting needed. Replacing "whom" with "what person" sounds horrid. Indeed I can't think of a way of recasting that sentence that isn't significantly worse.
Okay, maybe not "significantly worse" -- I'll settle for just "worse". Sadly "whom" is going away, and I'm trying to come to grips with that (whisky helps). But I will continue to use it in memory of the brave whom users who have gone before me. Their struggle should not be forgotten.
Me and Tom as subject, is very common, even by people who disapprove of it. Tom and I is suspect.
Tom and I ARE suspect.
Yah Boo Sucks alert
Technically no. That means both of you are suspected. What was suspect was the statement, which is singular, one statement. It could have been written " 'Tom and I' is suspect."
On the I/me problem, I know some people who always say, "X and I," no matter the context. This is because they've heard the Queen saying, "My husband and I," and therefore that is always right!
On the I/me problem, I know some people who always say, "X and I," no matter the context. This is because they've heard the Queen saying, "My husband and I," and therefore that is always right!
It's probably a result of the overcorrection referred to above. Been happening since at least Shakespeare.
Yes, agree on over-correction. People start thinking X and me cannot be right, whatever the sentence position. "They sent a parcel to Mary and I".
On whom, on its last legs in the UK. I grilled my wife extensively, and she confessed that she has never used it, and she is well posh. I pressed her on constructions like "to whom shall I address the letter?", and I'm afraid to say she snorted in a very unladylike way. O tempora, O mores!
"Whom" is likewise on its last legs here in the US. The distinction between "I" and "me" which indicates subject/object position in a sentence is waiting in line for the guillotine.
A couple of semesters ago, there was this student who just Would. Not. Budge. from his "me and Tom" constructions. He agreed that writing "Me went to the store" was wrong, but would not / could not explain what made the "me" fine again when a second subject was added to the sentence. He agreed that "I went to the store" was right. We both agreed that "I and Tom went to the store" sounded weird even though perhaps technically correct. But I could not persuade him to solve the weirdness by reversing the order in which the subjects got named by writing "Tom and I."
The plain fact is that in English, nearly any suspect usage is probably most easily resolved by simply re-writing the sentence. When I sit with students over their work, they often stare in perplexed defeat for minutes on end (if I let them) at some problematic sentence. I sometimes actually cover the offending sentence with my hand and ask the student, "What did you mean?" There's usually a prompt, quick, simple response. I tell the student to write that response down and insert it in place of the original sentence.
If I could somehow get student writers to do this on their own, my job would take up half the time it currently does.
Well, personally, I wouldn’t choose to correct you as it’s not my place to do so.
I would however be thinking would he/she say “Me am going out”? No. It would be “I am going out”, so why does adding another person to the sentence change the personal pronoun,
My dialect has "Me and John are going to the pub", as OK, and "John and I" is ultra-weird.
Certainly very formal, in many English dialects.
The thing is the rule*, as observed from actual speech, is not a simple I = subject; me = object. It's more I = single subject; me = all other positions. That accurately describes how the pronouns are actually used by many speakers. It goes further than "Me and Tom".
"Me and him are going to have a falling out" - "He and I" would sound formal.
In this model, subjective "Tom and I" is an over-correction. Be that as it may, the artificial I/me subject/object distinction from the prescriptivists, and over-correction resulting from it, has itself been an influence on the language. Hence the rule which actually defines how a wider more encompassing population of speakers use the pronouns is:
Single Subject: I
Single Object: Me
Compound Subject/Object: selection of I or Me depending on dialect and register.
My personal usage admits Me as a compound subject in informal speech but would use I in writing. It would never admit I as a compound object.
Inasmuch as Standard English is now a partially artificial dialect, command of which is required in certain formal spheres, we certainly do need to enable people to use the formal rules when writing. That's a different thing to insisting people saying "Me and John went to the store" and "between you and I" are wrong. It'd just be an inappropriate selection in a formal context. This is register and can be and is taught explicitly. The alternative is essentially the excision of dialect.
*I see grammatical rules as rather like rules of physics - Newton's laws of motion don't tell planets how to move; they describe how planets actually do move. And inasmuch as they don't, quite, move how Newton predicted, we do not insist the planets are wrong, but we refine the rules, for example by introducing special and general relativity.
Well, personally, I wouldn’t choose to correct you as it’s not my place to do so.
I would however be thinking would he/she say “Me am going out”? No. It would be “I am going out”, so why does adding another person to the sentence change the personal pronoun,
Well, that's an interesting question, but it does. Thus, "I and John are going out", sounds very weird to me, and "John and I are going out", unnatural. But this is my dialect, where "Me and John" is common.
It seems to apply to other pronouns, thus, "he and John are going out" is highly unnatural for me, and "him and John", OK.
Something to do with coordinated subjects? A Ph.D. beckons for somebody.
Well, personally, I wouldn’t choose to correct you as it’s not my place to do so.
I would however be thinking would he/she say “Me am going out”? No. It would be “I am going out”, so why does adding another person to the sentence change the personal pronoun,
Language isn't logical. It does weird things. If that's what the speech community uses, that's how it works.
My wife pointed out that in answer to a question, "who made this mess?", the reply "I" is odd, and most people would say me. So there seems to be an aversion to I in some positions.
My wife pointed out that in answer to a question, "who made this mess?", the reply "I" is odd, and most people would say me. So there seems to be an aversion to I in some positions.
Another view on it I've heard is that 'me' is the unmarked form, whereas 'I' is the form marked for specific purposes, which vary by dialect and register. In formal registers the marked form is used in all subject positions, but its use is more restricted in informal registers.
A similar thing happened with noun cases in French and Spanish; in both of these it is the Latin accusative which has survived rather than the nominative. Old French had a two case system - nominative and oblique, with the oblique generally formed from the Latin accusative but absorbing the functions of Dative and Ablative as well (genitive replaced by a construction using de, of course). Because that meant that the oblique was found far more often than the nominative, having more functions, the oblique became the unmarked form, with the nominative a special form marked for subjective use. In time, it was the nominative which fell out of use altogether.
But I digress.
For real linguistic illogicality, Welsh uses a singular third person verb form for plural subjects, unless you're using the pronoun, in which, and only, case you can use the plural verb ending. So it's "they are", but "the children is". Again, it's actually a matter of marked and unmarked forms - "is" is the unmarked form, used in all cases except where there's a pronoun subject.
Me and Tom as subject, is very common, even by people who disapprove of it. Tom and I is suspect.
Tom and I ARE suspect.
Yah Boo Sucks alert
Technically no. That means both of you are suspected. What was suspect was the statement, which is singular, one statement. It could have been written " 'Tom and I' is suspect."
Indeed. Should have been. It is a prime example of use/mention confusion.
It was also a joke. I know that's not always clear; no blame.
My wife pointed out that in answer to a question, "who made this mess?", the reply "I" is odd, and most people would say me. So there seems to be an aversion to I in some positions.
Or one might say "I did." I can't imagine saying "me" in that case. But that's just I.
Language isn't logical. It does weird things. If that's what the speech community uses, that's how it works.
Agreed, but we’re not part of the same speech community all the time. A woman may find herself in one speech community when she’s at home with her husband and children, in a different speech community when she’s chatting to her fellow employees while they’re waiting for the lift, and in a third one when the same employees are sitting round a conference table with their boss. And that’s just for spoken English. There’s a corresponding, but separate, range of communities for written English.
Comments
Me and Tom is the spontaneous form in many English dialects, arguments about pronoun case notwithstanding. This may be why people struggle to cope with the formal rule, especially in spontaneous speech, and over-correct to using the Tom and I form as object as well as subject.
Stephen Pinker had some good stuff on this IIRC. Even Shakespeare did it apparently - the phrase "between you and I" occurs in Merchant of Venice.
Interesting article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_you_and_I
I never said pop music isn’t nuanced. Trust me I know it is. Pop music is made to listened to in short burst, most song lasting roughly 3 mins. There are uses of modes to make them more interesting and various other musical devices, but essentially they are packages of music that need to get their meaning across in a short time.
Art music uses longer forms to get its meaning across. By its very nature it plays with music in a mor complicated way. The longer format allows the composer to develop their ideas more. They are made to be listened two and don’t work as well when used as background music as pop music
I suppose the alternative would be "on the other hand." "She doesn't like sausages, but I, on the other hand, love them."
Tom and I ARE suspect.
whomst
:projectilevomit:
Ye gods. Seen where? Can you at least post the sentence (or word group, in the event no actual sentence exists) in which this appeared?
Re "whomst":
Well, I just searched with Duck Duck Go, and it's a little more complicated than that.
Many sites say it's just a made-up word. Others say it's an Internet meme. However, Wiktionary has this:
Argh. No. I'll see your :projectilevomit: and raise you three shudders.
Again, in UK English my experience is that whom is almost entirely absent from the spoken language and optional in writing. Because it's mostly only found in formal writing, it's sometimes reanalysed as a formal form of who, hence spreading into subject position.
It also seems unable to stand as a direct object separated from its preposition; hence
Who are you writing to?
And
To whom are you writing?
Are both possible, whereas:
To who are you writing?
Whom are you writing to?
Are both somewhere odd.
The formality of whom seems to correspond to the formality of keeping the preposition in front of the pronoun, rather than treating it as part.of a verbal phrase.
This is UK English; YMMV.
I feel the same way. Starting a sentence with "whom" sounds barbaric. Your examples are exactly what sounds right to my ear; switching it, as you show, sounds wrong.
Thx.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/04/magazine/on-language-who-trusts-whom.html
"You gave my priceless heirloom to whom?" works fine, no recasting needed. Replacing "whom" with "what person" sounds horrid. Indeed I can't think of a way of recasting that sentence that isn't significantly worse.
Yah Boo Sucks alert
Technically no. That means both of you are suspected. What was suspect was the statement, which is singular, one statement. It could have been written " 'Tom and I' is suspect."
Indeed, but you can find people who'll reject anything if you look hard enough.
I personally come across very few people who spontaneously use whom in speech.
It's probably a result of the overcorrection referred to above. Been happening since at least Shakespeare.
On whom, on its last legs in the UK. I grilled my wife extensively, and she confessed that she has never used it, and she is well posh. I pressed her on constructions like "to whom shall I address the letter?", and I'm afraid to say she snorted in a very unladylike way. O tempora, O mores!
A couple of semesters ago, there was this student who just Would. Not. Budge. from his "me and Tom" constructions. He agreed that writing "Me went to the store" was wrong, but would not / could not explain what made the "me" fine again when a second subject was added to the sentence. He agreed that "I went to the store" was right. We both agreed that "I and Tom went to the store" sounded weird even though perhaps technically correct. But I could not persuade him to solve the weirdness by reversing the order in which the subjects got named by writing "Tom and I."
The plain fact is that in English, nearly any suspect usage is probably most easily resolved by simply re-writing the sentence. When I sit with students over their work, they often stare in perplexed defeat for minutes on end (if I let them) at some problematic sentence. I sometimes actually cover the offending sentence with my hand and ask the student, "What did you mean?" There's usually a prompt, quick, simple response. I tell the student to write that response down and insert it in place of the original sentence.
If I could somehow get student writers to do this on their own, my job would take up half the time it currently does.
My dialect has "Me and John are going to the pub", as OK, and "John and I" is ultra-weird.
I would however be thinking would he/she say “Me am going out”? No. It would be “I am going out”, so why does adding another person to the sentence change the personal pronoun,
Certainly very formal, in many English dialects.
The thing is the rule*, as observed from actual speech, is not a simple I = subject; me = object. It's more I = single subject; me = all other positions. That accurately describes how the pronouns are actually used by many speakers. It goes further than "Me and Tom".
"Me and him are going to have a falling out" - "He and I" would sound formal.
In this model, subjective "Tom and I" is an over-correction. Be that as it may, the artificial I/me subject/object distinction from the prescriptivists, and over-correction resulting from it, has itself been an influence on the language. Hence the rule which actually defines how a wider more encompassing population of speakers use the pronouns is:
Single Subject: I
Single Object: Me
Compound Subject/Object: selection of I or Me depending on dialect and register.
My personal usage admits Me as a compound subject in informal speech but would use I in writing. It would never admit I as a compound object.
Inasmuch as Standard English is now a partially artificial dialect, command of which is required in certain formal spheres, we certainly do need to enable people to use the formal rules when writing. That's a different thing to insisting people saying "Me and John went to the store" and "between you and I" are wrong. It'd just be an inappropriate selection in a formal context. This is register and can be and is taught explicitly. The alternative is essentially the excision of dialect.
*I see grammatical rules as rather like rules of physics - Newton's laws of motion don't tell planets how to move; they describe how planets actually do move. And inasmuch as they don't, quite, move how Newton predicted, we do not insist the planets are wrong, but we refine the rules, for example by introducing special and general relativity.
Well, that's an interesting question, but it does. Thus, "I and John are going out", sounds very weird to me, and "John and I are going out", unnatural. But this is my dialect, where "Me and John" is common.
It seems to apply to other pronouns, thus, "he and John are going out" is highly unnatural for me, and "him and John", OK.
Something to do with coordinated subjects? A Ph.D. beckons for somebody.
Language isn't logical. It does weird things. If that's what the speech community uses, that's how it works.
Another view on it I've heard is that 'me' is the unmarked form, whereas 'I' is the form marked for specific purposes, which vary by dialect and register. In formal registers the marked form is used in all subject positions, but its use is more restricted in informal registers.
A similar thing happened with noun cases in French and Spanish; in both of these it is the Latin accusative which has survived rather than the nominative. Old French had a two case system - nominative and oblique, with the oblique generally formed from the Latin accusative but absorbing the functions of Dative and Ablative as well (genitive replaced by a construction using de, of course). Because that meant that the oblique was found far more often than the nominative, having more functions, the oblique became the unmarked form, with the nominative a special form marked for subjective use. In time, it was the nominative which fell out of use altogether.
But I digress.
For real linguistic illogicality, Welsh uses a singular third person verb form for plural subjects, unless you're using the pronoun, in which, and only, case you can use the plural verb ending. So it's "they are", but "the children is". Again, it's actually a matter of marked and unmarked forms - "is" is the unmarked form, used in all cases except where there's a pronoun subject.
^
Indeed. Should have been. It is a prime example of use/mention confusion.
It was also a joke. I know that's not always clear; no blame.
One could say "we".
Or one might say "I did." I can't imagine saying "me" in that case. But that's just I.
Agreed, but we’re not part of the same speech community all the time. A woman may find herself in one speech community when she’s at home with her husband and children, in a different speech community when she’s chatting to her fellow employees while they’re waiting for the lift, and in a third one when the same employees are sitting round a conference table with their boss. And that’s just for spoken English. There’s a corresponding, but separate, range of communities for written English.