everyone but me surrendered

[JEic]

In the book, 'Afternoons with Emily", the following sentence appears:

- Everyone but me surrendered to the evangelists.

I thought 'me' is an object pronoun. Is the above sentence correct grammatically? It sounds right yet weird at the same time.

 

[5jj]

It's fine.

 

[JEic]

It's fine.

I don't understand why it's fine to use an object pronoun there. Can you kindly explain why it's fine?

 

[Cunning Fox]

Not a teacher nor a native speaker.

The sentence is correct. I assume you think it should be "but I" instead of "but me". The reason why you're on the wrong track is that "but" is a preposition and prepositions generally require the accusative form of the pronoun (hence, "me"). You could easily reword the sentence to use "but I": "Everyone surrendered to them but I didn't". However, "but" would be a conjunction in that case. Strictly speaking, it wouldn't be "but I" but "but I didn't" because you'd need a complete sentence.

 

[Rover_KE]

To me, the weird-sounding bit is 'surrendered to the evangelists', but the wider context probably clarifies that.