Julia Sneden: Lessons From a Lifetime in the Classroom: YOU AND I, ME, US, THEY, THEM, WHATEVER! (and “Mike and I’s wedding”)

Pronouns, pronouns, pronouns: does no one these days teach youngsters how to use them?

The other day a bemused friend quoted from a sweet letter she had received:

“Just seeing your face at Mike and I’s wedding…” 

Had the young woman been writing on her computer, not by hand as etiquette demands, the letter would have been less charming but more grammatically correct, since Spell-check would doubtless have caught her error.^1. Of course that wouldn’t prevent her from hitting the “Ignore” button and leaving it as is, but let’s give her and Spell-check the benefit of that doubt.

In fact, Spell-check may prove a better instructor than many of the elementary school teachers turned out by our universities. Back in the ‘50’s, my mother made quite a bit of pocket money by correcting the dissertations of graduate students seeking doctorates in Education. Her efforts often went beyond merely correcting grammar, because many of those students lacked the ability to present their ideas logically, in clear prose. The writers tended to use big words, but unfortunately they often didn’t use them correctly in either syntax or meaning. Mother tacked a sign saying “Eschew Obfuscation” over her desk. She was rarely asked what it meant.

Somehow we have forgotten how to teach grammar using simple, clear rules. When I was young, we were introduced to the difference between subjective and objective and possessive pronouns at an early age. I remember my fourth grade teacher parsing the subjective pronouns with us: “I, you, he-she-it; we, you, they,” and then demonstrating how and where to use them in a sentence.

After a few days of that, there was literally no chance that any of us would begin a sentence using “Her and me went to the store,” because we were well aware that her and me weren’t subject material. Trickier to handle were cases where one needed two objective pronouns, but Miss Bartram had a quick remedy for our confusions there. If we didn’t know which case to use in a sentence like “The teacher gave Maddy and (I? me?) a lecture,” she said to drop “Maddy” from the sentence and listen to it in our minds: “She gave I a lecture” was obviously not something we’d say.

In this day and age, I’m not sure that strategy would work (see “Mike and I’s wedding” above), but it has worked for me for all the years since I was nine.

The structure of our language receives little attention nowadays, perhaps because the teachers themselves have had little exposure to its rules. Our grandparents were drilled, as was I, on things like case and tense and the voice of verbs. That rarely happens today.