elisi | Aaaah, fandom...

Current Mood: amused

Aaaah, fandom...

Sometimes fandom throws out the wonderfullest lines. Such as this question:

You have experience decapitating with a xacto knife? ;-)

It being the latest in a growing discussion of AOQ's review of FFL.

There's also a guy (3D master) who's so anti-Spike that he's made himself a whole new theory about him, that fits with pretty much nothing of canon. *shakes head in amusement*

Also I just realised that I've yet to show off my new icon!

st_salieri found it hidden on her laptop. Isn't it brilliant? Salieri is very clever! :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

Great icon!

I just read the review, not the comments so tell em...Did anyone coment on:

They're not like you and I," comes from William.
(Poets don't bother with proper grammar.)

Because 3 years ago I started a whole grammar war on the Internet about that "like you and I"! The funny thing was that it wasn't a war between Americans and Brits since the war divided North America as well as British Isles!

Nobody agreed on that at the time. I even asked my colleagues who taught English and started a new kerfuffle between them at school with it!

I have been told by an English friend that the use of "me" was actually not proper grammar for a long time until recently. A scottish colleague who taught English seconded that, but another teacher said that the use of I was a mistake.

"I" was always the proper grammar when I was at school. The use of "me" was a definite no-no! I still find myself using "you and I" rather than "you and me" even now. *g* In the England of William's time I would have thought that "you and I" would definitely have been the proper way of saying it. :)

Of course, I could be wrong...

Thanks!

That's exactly what my English friend told me. Being French I only instinctively knew that William didn't make a grammar mistake (I thought that the verb was implied and also I must have read "you and I" in English plays I guess when I was a student in my 20's)but some English people told me I was wrong and he should have said "you and me" and I had a Canadian friend (from Vancouver) who was horrified by William's faux-pas.

"I" is one of the few words in the English language retaining a few of its old case endings, and most kids today aren't taught what a case is. Because "You" is correct for both the singular and plural second person pronoun, many people get confused. "You and I" is hammered into their heads as the correct nominative case that they hyper-correct and use it for the objective case as well.

But there's an easy way to determine the correct case for compound subjects and compound objects: break "They're not like you and I," up into "They're not like you," and "They're not like I." The latter is clearly wrong; it should be "They're not like me." On the other hand, if the sentence were "You and __ should go to the park," then "I" would be correct, because "You and I" is the subject of the sentence.

(For further headaches, note that I'm using the correct but almost-completely-abandoned past subjunctive mood of "to be" in the sentence above--nine out of ten speakers of American English will probably tell you that it should be "if the sentence was 'You and I.'")

But that's the problem and it was the knot of the war in question. According to several Brits "I" was the proper use even if it were not a subject! My friend told me it was a bit pedantic a use, but definitely proper grammar.

An American friend who studied grammar in college backed it! Too bad I didn't save the numerous emails that were exchanged then.

But others thought that it should have been "like you and me" because it was an objective case (and also because of the use of "like" instead of "as").

And there I was, I who isn't an English speaker! *g*

I asked my husband, and he came down (heavily) on the 'you and me' side ("If you use 'I' you're a moron - you wouldn't say 'They're beneath I'!")

English is a haaaard language sometimes!

LOL

Sorry, I didnt' mean to start that thing again on your LJ and spread the grammar war in your family!

I bet that my friend would have told him that "They are beneath I" might actually be oldfashioned and affected, but actually correct!

Somehow I liked her side because being affected and using such a language fit a poet who wrote a word like "effulgent"!

No worries - Daarcy is a grammar fiend anyway. He has a BA in English and it hurts him when people misuse the language.

'You and I' does sound affected, so maybe that's the explanation...

That is exactly correct. People who were taught that saying "You and me are great friends" was wrong, adn "You and I are great friends" is correct, without understanding why the first one was wrong, over-correct to saying "They are not like you and I" in order to sound more refined. (I seriously doubt that William would really have made such an error.) It gets even more confusing because "He is not as brave as you and I," is correct. (I've totally forgotten the rule for that one, though. Where's

mistraltoes when you need her?)

Oh, now i'm muddled again :)

Is the sentence really: "They are not like you and I are" / "They are not like you are and I am"?

Ok, now I'm muddled. *g* If it were "They are not as you and I," I'd say that was correct, so... hmm. There's got to be a real live grammar book lying around somewhere that will settle this...

OK, I went and looked it up rather than relying on twenty-five year old memories of English class. From ENGLISH GRAMMAR: EXPLANATIONS AND EXERCISES by Mary Ansell, conveniently available on the web here:

"When a personal pronoun is used in a comparison to represent the second thing being compared, the subjective case of the pronoun should be used. The reason for this is that the pronoun is the subject of a verb, even when the verb is omitted by means of ellipsis."

So William is right after all. *g*

Heh. Awesome. William is right, but what's the betting the writers actually knew the rule?

But this is NOT CORRECT! I don't know who Mary Ansell is and I'm not entirely sure what she's trying to say (that the pronoun is in apposition to the thing it's being compared with and therefore takes the same case? This simply isn't true of English, as your own examples show). This "second pronoun in a comparison" business is wrong - we say "People like us and them don't do that sort of thing", "He isn't anything like us or them", "She's as clever as him and me". You were right in the first place - "Like you and I" is a hypercorrection, and maybe one day it'll become so widespread that it becomes correct, but at the moment it's the result of confusion.

Nonono, she's right, and this is why: I was predicating my original argument on the supposition that in a comparision such as "They are not like him and me," that "him and me" were the objects of a verb. But they aren't. "Like/notlike" and "as" are not verbs. They're comparative conjunctions linking two independent clauses, each of which contains its own subject and verb (although in the second clause, the verb is usually ellided): "They are" and "Him and me are." "Him and me" is the subject of that second independent clause, and both clauses together make up the compound subject of the sentence as a whole, and so should be "He and I are." The verb in the sentence is "to be," and there is no object.

Clear as mud?

But but but... splutter... this is ENGLISH we're talking about. Conjunctions be damned - and I'm not at all sure I buy the argument that "like" is a conjunction anyway - we say "That's me" and "I'm him!" where the subject and the object are clearly identical. And going back to your original argument - that if there is just one pronoun then it is definitely NOT in the nominative case ("I'm not like him" instead of "I'm not like he") - why would this structure suddenly change and become a "comparative conjunction" just because there are TWO pronouns?? It's the same kind of hypercorrection that gave rise to "It is I" (which I'm sure William would have committed, wannabe poet and member of the aspirant middle class that he is).

Or maybe Ansell of thinking of structures like "People like you and I hate that sort of thing" where "you and I" is indeed functioning as the subject of the sentence? Whereas in William's example "They" is the subject.

Also (and this is my clinching argument :-)) you get exactly the same kind of hypercorrection in contexts where it's clearly grammatically incorrect, such as "He gave it to you and I". The second pronoun confuses the hell out of people and they put it in the nominative because they think that's correct (who knows, maybe this is also an example of English giving up its last vestiges of case altogether).

Yup, "like" can be used as a conjunction. (Check out dictionary.com, the seventh and last definition of 'like.') And that's the sense in which it's being used in the examples we're talking about. ("Like" can be a verb, as in "He likes fish." It can also be a preposition, a noun, an adverb, or an adjective, depending upon how it's used in a sentence.)

Informal, common usage is "I'm not like him," but put that implicit verb back in there--"I'm not like him is"--and suddenly you can see how it sounds weird. It really does expand into two independent clauses, "I am" and "He is."

Your final example is indeed incorrect, but that's because in that sentence "he and I" is the indirect object of "to give."

I'm going to go look this up in some offline sources this weekend to see if the confirm it, though.

OK, I found a much more comprehensive explanation, but will have to type it in later...

I've now plowed through three usage manuals and it all seems to hinge on whether 'like' is being used as a conjunction or a preposition. If it's a conjunction, the following pronoun takes the nominative. If it's a preposition, the following pronoun takes the objective. And looking at the examples they give, I honestly can't tell the difference. To add to the confusion, the use of 'like' as a conjunction, while widespread, is frowned upon. And even if you accept it as a conjunction, several sources point out that using the objective pronoun after a conjunction is common usage and the 'correct' nominative often sounds ridiculously pedantic.

I think I'm going to give up now. Look! Cows!

Ooh, cows! Cool!

Re: Fun with grammar

elisi - 2006-06-19 14:30 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Fun with grammar

frenchani.livejournal.com - 2006-06-19 15:25 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Fun with grammar

frenchani.livejournal.com - 2006-06-19 15:32 (UTC) - Expand

I knew it!!!!

There may be a difference between British and American usage there (and in the U.S., it may eventually become accepted usage just because so many people say it that way now.) But I'm pretty sure if you look in the grammar books, they still say that 'me' is always the correct usage for an object!

Thank you! I was going to attempt to say the same thing, but with more words and probably making less sense! *g*

I have never understood that. Suddenly light beams through the clouds.

Did you see what you started? My LJ turned into an English lesson! With cows!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

Aaaah, fandom...

no subject

no subject

no subject

Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

Re: Fun with grammar

no subject