 It's me vs. It is I
Methinks that William the Conqueror and Doctor Johnson are to blame for all this, despite Pinker's valiant but unconvincing effort to enlighten us. In French, you have to say 'C'est moi' - literally: It's me - with 'moi' being neither subject pronoun 'je' nor object pronoun 'me', as in 'Je t'aime', 'Tu m'aimes'. Unfortumately, 'moi' was (I think) the old dative pronoun - at any rate you have to use it after prepositions, as in 'avec moi' (with me), 'sans toi' (without you) - so how it came to serve as a free-standing pronoun beats me, but the correct one-word answer to 'Qui l'a fait?' (Who did it?) is 'Moi' (Me).
No one might have worried had Dr Johnson and his Classics-drenched pals not put a spanner in the works by insisting that after the verb 'be' subject pronoun must be used, for that's how it is in Latin, bequeathing to us the likes of 'It is I' - similar to German 'Ich bin es' (lit: I am it), something like which the pre-Conquest English must have said. Luckily, today we're only likely to hear this unnatural construct when it's uttered Pythonesquely tongue in cheek, but mighty damage has been wrought in the meantime, with much ink and breath wasted on the subjective and objective cases, on masculine pronouns and possessive adjectives being impossibly impersonal, on prepositions not ending sentences, on the infinitive's unsplittability, and what have you.
In the 20th century, Fowler in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage gave advice that was not only witty but also common-sense, but unfortunately he's been swamped by the language mavens Pinker - rightly - loves to deride. However, so far no one's mentioned hypercorrection as a cause of 'between you and I'. Ą la Pinker, we know that no one would ever say 'without I' or 'before I', but, having lost the feel for case in 'between you and me', they find it unnatural- and wrong-sounding, and cast about for and come up with a right-sounding alternative. Et voilą - 'between you and I' it is! Personally, I still like old-fashioned 'between you and me', but then I also think Standard English should be 'Has everybody brought their book?', so what do I know?  |