John McWhorter’s me

I flagged this sentence when I linked to John McWhorter’s commentary on a professor’s showing of an adaptation of Othello :

Were me and my students missing something about which our modern era is more enlightened?

And now McWhorter has written a column defending his choice of me. Many readers, he says, insisted that the sentence should read “my students and I.” (Welll, yes.) But McWhorter assures us,

I’m aware of this “rule.” However, my being a linguist is much of why I often flout it. The idea that pronouns must be in what is termed their subject form whenever they are used as subjects seems so obvious, and yet it is just something some people made up not too long ago. It isn’t how English works from a scientific perspective.

The examples he uses to cast doubt on this “rule”: 1. we don’t say “I and you know,” and 2. if someone asks who did it, we answer “Me,” not “I.” Yes, and yes. But that’s because you and I and this use of me are idiomatic, just as aren’t, not amn’t, is the standard contraction for am I not. That’s just the way the language goes, and there’s nothing “scientific” about it.

McWhorter goes on to assert that

before or after a conjunction, one may use either I or me : “You and me know”; “Me and you know.” This is true of subject versus object forms of he, she, we and they, as well: “You and him know”; “Her and me know.”

He also gives the okay to between you and I :

Shakespeare used “between you and I,” for example, in The Merchant of Venice. English speakers simply sense I as OK when it sits a certain distance from the preposition, such as after a pronoun plus an and.

There’s what an astute editor (whose blog has disappeared) called the “Jane Austen” fallacy — if Jane Austen, &c. used it, it must be okay. As that editor wrote, “past usage does not justify modern practice.”

And now I’m thinking of a cringe-worthy line from the Brian Wilson song “The Night Was So Young”: “Love was made for her and I.” I’m not sure what John McWhorter would say about those pronouns.

My conclusion: if readers wonder about a sentence, if the sentence looks blatantly wrong, if the sentence displaces attention to your argument, if you feel obliged to take 1,210 words to justify that sentence, you’re doing it wrong. A wiser strategy: practice what Garner’s Modern English Usage calls preventive grammar. Faced, for instance, with the choice between “Neither you nor I am a plumber” and “Neither you nor I are a plumber,”

The best recourse is a rewording. Why perpetrate a sentence that’s awkward but arguably defensible? A sentence that’s only defensible will raise doubts in the reasonable reader’s mind.

Thus: “You’re not a plumber, and neither am I.”

I told Elaine about the plumber sentences, and both her and me came up with Bryan Garner’s recommended rewording.

But of course John McWhorter wasn’t even faced with an awkward choice between two ugly sentences. “Were my students and I missing out” is good English. “Were me and my students missing out” isn’t. Even if one insists that we look at language “from a scientific perspective,” it’s still a good idea not to create distraction.

And speaking of distraction, look again at these sentences:

I’m aware of this “rule.” However, my being a linguist is much of why I often flout it.

So much better:

I’m aware of this “rule,” but as a linguist, I often choose to flout it.

But not, I bet, in official correspondence at Columbia U.