![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Grammar May Be Changing
Jul. 9th, 2021 12:48 amGrammar has been described as the mistakes our grandparents made, to which one may reply that there is at least some merit to keeping usages which were once mistakes stable and consistent; that way, we may hope to understand each other, and to avoid the grating sensation which some people experience when they read prose which violates the rules that they have come to feel to be proper and harmonious.
The trigger for this screed is an advice column in Slate which uses a subjective pronoun as the object of a verb: “My 16-year-old daughter has recently told her mother and I that she is pregnant.” Your daughter doesn’t tell I; she tells me, and this remains the case (pun intended) even when “her mother and” comes between the verb and its object.
What gets my goat is that this does not seem to be mere carelessness. (I’m under the impression that the girl was merely careless rather than setting out to become a teen mother, but that’s a different matter.) I have noticed the misuse of “I” for “me” before, as in “to my husband and I”, but this seems to be a deliberate “correction”, because it links to a “classic Prudie” column from a few years ago, and in the original, the sentence is “My 16-year-old daughter has recently told her mother and me that she is pregnant.” Someone seems to have taken it on himself to “correct” it to what sounds right to him, which is all wrong.
O tempora! O mores!
The trigger for this screed is an advice column in Slate which uses a subjective pronoun as the object of a verb: “My 16-year-old daughter has recently told her mother and I that she is pregnant.” Your daughter doesn’t tell I; she tells me, and this remains the case (pun intended) even when “her mother and” comes between the verb and its object.
What gets my goat is that this does not seem to be mere carelessness. (I’m under the impression that the girl was merely careless rather than setting out to become a teen mother, but that’s a different matter.) I have noticed the misuse of “I” for “me” before, as in “to my husband and I”, but this seems to be a deliberate “correction”, because it links to a “classic Prudie” column from a few years ago, and in the original, the sentence is “My 16-year-old daughter has recently told her mother and me that she is pregnant.” Someone seems to have taken it on himself to “correct” it to what sounds right to him, which is all wrong.
O tempora! O mores!
