I found this a little silly, both the Op-ed itself and the fact that anyone thought it newsworthy to mention that Obama, like the rest of us, uses informal spoken language from time to time:
Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.”
What raised my hackles slightly was this excerpt, employing a common trope that sees grammar as a 19th-century Victorian obsession born of too much time studying that inflexible and boring old language Latin:
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that language mavens began kvetching about “I” and “me.” The first kvetch cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage came from a commencement address in 1846. In 1869, Richard Meade Bache included it in his book “Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech.”
Why did these 19th-century wordies insist “I” is “I” and “me” is “me”? They were probably influenced by Latin, with its rigid treatment of subject and object pronouns. For whatever reason, their approach stuck — at least in the rule books.
I don’t know anything about the authors of those rulebooks, but the “I vs. me” subject-object distinction does not owe itself to Latin or the 19th century: it appears in the very earliest written English. Back in the old days (prior to 1100AD) English was an inflected language. For I, we had “ic” — the nominative; the form of “me” was either “me” or “mec” — the accusative. Over time we lost most of our inflections, but a few hang around: he versus him, she versus her, and yes I versus me. This has nothing to do with Latin. True, Latin has inflections but so did all Indo-European languages at some point in their past.
And as for Latin itself, how can a language with no word order be considered rigid? One of the reasons there’s so much incredible Latin poetry is that it’s a very flexible idiom. The following are all perfectly grammatical ways to write “Caesar loves me,” a comforting sentiment, in classical Latin:
- Caesar me amat.
- Amat me Caesar.
- Me Caesar amat.
- Amat Caesar me.
- Me amat Caesar.
- Caesar amat me.
In English, of course, there’s only one way to write this. So which language is really rigid when it comes to personal pronouns?
On a final note, I admit that language is more or less arbitrary and changing all the time, but I still don’t think “Shakespeare broke this rule” is a good argument against prescriptive grammar. Shakespeare, we would do well to remember, also didn’t use regularized spelling. Grammar is a convention that allows us to understand each other and be understood by future generations who might like to read what we’ve left behind. What’s so bad about that?