In my recent review of the repeated action words, I gave this prescription in the Forum for using “not” as one such word:
“
‘Not.’ Negation of a statement can be done very efficiently by this repeated action word: ‘Most think that going to Baguio City at this time of year is great;
not me.’”
Of course, without the benefit of ellipsis—a grammar device for making sentences more compact—and the use of “not” as repeated action word, that sentence takes this insufferably long-winded form: “Most think that going to Baguio City at this time of year is great;
I don’t think that going to Baguio City at this time of year is great.”
That’s clear, undebatable grammar, but a Forum member based in Texas who calls herself Cherlang—she says she’s a grammar interventionist/ student teacher supervisor in a state university—made this comment about my use of “me” in the example I presented:
“During my first year of teaching over 40 years ago, a very proper older teacher corrected me on something similar, saying my response should have been ‘Not I.’ Would you set me straight on why ‘Not me’ in your example is correct, please?”
I told Cherlang that I’m very comfortable with my use of the objective pronoun “me” in that sentence. I explained that although grammar prescriptivists insist on the nominative pronoun “I” in such constructions, I routinely use “me” because it’s better-sounding and more spontaneous. This is particularly the case in less formal writing and speech—the kind of English where the sentence “Most think that going to Baguio City at this time of year is great;
not me” obviously belongs.
Indeed, like the English-usage writer Patricia T. O’Conner, author of
Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, I consider the use of “me” in such constructions as now standard English. I therefore quoted in full Ms. O’Conner’s defense of the grammatical correctness of the “me” usage in her
Grammarphobia website, where she invoked the authority of
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
Ms. O’Conner’s point is this: “The nominative pattern (‘It is I’) is generally used in formal English, but the objective (‘It is me’) is universally and legitimately used in less formal writing and speech.”
To dispel any further doubt about the legitimacy of my use of “not me,” I then invoked this usage note of the online
Oxford Dictionaries:
“Where a personal pronoun is used alone without the context of a verb or a preposition… the traditional analysis (of the subjective and objective usage of the personal pronouns) starts to break down. Traditionalists sometimes argue, for example, that
‘she’s younger than me’ and
‘I’ve not been here as long as her’ are incorrect and that the correct forms are
‘she’s younger than I’ and
‘I’ve not been here as long as she.’ This is based on the assumption that
‘than’ and
‘as’ are conjunctions and so the personal pronoun is still subjective even though there is no verb (in full form it would be
‘she’s younger than I am’). Yet for most native speakers the supposed ‘correct’ form does not sound natural at all and is almost never used in speech. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that, in modern English, those personal pronouns listed above as being
objective are used neutrally—i.e. they are used in all cases where the pronoun is not explicitly
subjective. From this it follows that, despite the objections of prescriptive grammarians (whose arguments are based on Latin rather than English), it is standard accepted English to use any of the following:
‘Who is it? It’s me!’;
‘she’s taller than him’;
‘I didn’t do as well as her.’”
I think we can reliably take that usage advisory as the last word on this matter.
(2012)This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the August 4, 2012 issue of The Manila Times
, © 2012 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
