With you and many readers likely working at home or perhaps self-isolating to keep safe from the resurgent Covid-19 pandemic, I trust that you’ll find it opportune to refine your use of a powerful technique for avoiding superfluity when negating a repeated action.
Way back in 2018, I gave this prescription for achieving that objective: “Negation of a statement can be done very efficiently by
“not,” as in: ‘Most think that going to Baguio City at this time of year is great;
not me.’”
Of course, without “not” and the
ellipsis—a grammar device for making statements more compact—that sentence would be insufferably long-winded: “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.”
This was clear, undebatable grammar in my mind, but Texas-based Forum member Cherlang—a state university grammar interventionist/student teacher supervisor—disagreed with my use of “me” in that repeated action statement.
She declared in the Forum: “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 using the objective pronoun “me” in that sentence. Although grammar prescriptivists insist on the nominative pronoun “I” in such constructions, I routinely use “me” because it’s more spontaneous and, well, better-sounding. This is true particularly in less formal writing and day-to-day speech—the kind of English where the sentence at issue here obviously belongs.
As advocated by Patricia T. O’Conner in her book
Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, I consider using “me” in such constructions as now standard English. I therefore quoted in full Patricia’s defense of the grammatical correctness of the “me” usage in her Grammarphobia website. There, she invoked the authority of both
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
Patricia’s point: “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 support that contention, I then invoked this more detailed 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.’”
So then as now, we can reliably take that usage advisory as the last word on this matter.
This essay, 2081st of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the January 20, 2022 Internet edition of The Manila Times
,© 2022 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay online in
The Manila Times:
“Let’s get the “not me” vs. “not I” usage straight” (Next week:
Erosion of online language in social media) January 27, 2022
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
