A New Feature: The Brown Bag

Just between you and ….uh…just between us, that’s a very smart article Mr. Yagoda. Of course, in England you might think that the Ford Motor Company is singular, but the BBC will tell you that Ford are, not Ford is. Hooray for the various Englishes.

Indeed. And re your inset quote about John and Marsha’s meeting (and note the ‘s is not a noun suffix but a Noun Phrase suffix),  there are in fact quite a number of languages in various parts of the world which would say their equivalent of both / either

1.   Them met.  
         and / or   
2    They met.   

Such languages, a type Linguists call Active, would use (1) if the meeting were a chance encounter but 2. if it were prearranged, i.e. deliberate. 

And of course Modern Standard Literary and Scientific, Expository French says the equivalent of

      ’Him and me (we) went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.’
       Lui et moi (nous) sommes allés à la Nouvelle Orléans pour le Mardi Gras.

Pinker’s argument appears to me specious. Obviously, singular subjects and objects become plural when a new element is added by a conjunction. It is not at all obvious to me why this addition would make subjects become objects, and vice versa. But Yagoda’s closing argument is still more specious: we don’t say, “I’m going to see ‘The King and Me’” because ‘The King and I’ is a title. It is for the same reason that we don’t say “‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ were on television last night.”

I imagine the overuse of “myself” is due to fear of being incorrect when one is uncertain whether to say “John and I” or “John and myself.”

As for me, I find “between you and I” incredibly grating, simply because I learned that it was incorrect.  It seems like a mark of a poor education.  But that is probably unfair, as those younger than me (and most people are these days, sigh) may not have had the same 7th grade English teacher as I.

The plural of  is Dummkopf is Dummköpfe!

I think the biggest point of contention for me on discussions like this is that people use, “She invited you and I to dinner,” for instance, precisely because they are trying to be grammatically correct.  It is, in some real sense, an over-correction on the part of the speaker.

As such, it’s important to make a distinction between usage such as this and other “errors,” if there are such things any more.

One can, I think embrace and celebrate the fact that every language is changing and evolving–that it always has and always will–without allowing it to do so haphazardly.  If every misuse of language only serves as a platform to find a justification for why it might actually be acceptable, the polemic becomes no better for its over analysis than the detractors are for rigid observance of the “rules” of grammar.

Most people, most of the time, are ungrammatical.  Clever arguments as to why they are not “wrong.” really don’t accomplish much.  We don’t have some divinely-inspired grammar manual, but we do need distinctions and conventions to enable precise and clearly understood communications.  And the ongoing erosion of these makes it harder to communicate accurately.  But then, perhaps, clear and accurate communication is not a desideratum in our society.

You explained your position very well by using “The King and I,” but I don’t feel that “Al Gore and I” is the same kind of unit at all — it’s a phrase, not an exact title.

There seems to be a common (though not universal) thread here that supposes that conjunction can or ought have nothing to do with case assignment and that this is not just characteristic of Standard Literary and Expository English but is somehow a reflection of a universal logic and of how all languages work, or ought work. 

Not so.   Specifically regarding Dank48′s comment above and Robin Turner’s just above about number and case, in Modern Standard French, the objects of a conjunction are in the same case as the objects of a preposition. Thus   avec moi, lui, …  ‘with me, him …’, and  lui et moi .  The nominative case for single simple subjects are  il and je so one says

.Il est…    and  je suis…     ‘He is… and ‘I am….’.    But in conjoined subjects, the verb is plural to agree with the plural subject but the pronouns go into the disjunctive, or prepositional objective case, thus…..  

Lui et moi sommes , Jeannette et moi sommes…..
Him and me are… Jeanie and me are………

never *Il et je sommes, *Jeannette et je sommes….
*He and I are……. *Jeanie and I are….

where the “star”, i.e. asterisk marks an ungrammatical form.

So singular~plural agreement work on the basis of the subjects of the sentence but conjunction, like prepositions, trigger an oblique case assignment.  So while conjunction and case assignment are unrelated in Standard English, they certainly can be and are related in a number of other languages and it should not particularly surprise us to see them related in some dialects of English. And in no way is it indicative of illogical, crude, or shoddy thinking.

 Regarding your comparison to French, I agree with this part:

never *Il et je sommes, *Jeannette et je sommes….
*He and I are……. *Jeanie and I are….

but not entirely with this part:

Lui et moi sommes , Jeannette et moi sommes…..

Him and me are… Jeanie and me are………

I was taught to call “lui” and “moi” “stress pronouns,” and that the phrases above were actually truncated versions of

“Lui et moi, nous sommes …”
“Jeannette et moi, nous sommes … ”

In fact, if I recall correctly, “lui” et “moi” function as direct objects exclusively in imperative constructions:

“Donne-le moi” = “Give it to me.”
“Donne-le lui” = “Give it to him.”

In normal declarative sentences, “me” is “me” and “him” is “le” (direct object) or “lui” (indirect object).

So I don’t think we can make an exact parallel between the two languages.

The issue, though, is not: What counts as grammatical? In fact, the issue is deeper than that: What counts as a language? The answer, as I see it, is that it is the speakers of a language who define that language, if only because a language has no live existence outside of the brains of its speakers. Therefore, if the vast majority of English speakers use ‘between you and I’ as part of English—and, I would note, they have no trouble communicating while doing so—then that means that ‘between you and I’ is grammatical in English, because those speakers are the ones who define what the language actually is.

You know what I think was wrong?  Remember that penguin who got lost and ended up on a beach south of Wellington in New Zealand.  The kids named him Happy Feet and the public outcry against letting him die eating sand and trash on the beach shamed the powers that be into rescuing him.  They took him to the Wellington Zoo and washed out his stomach and nursed him back to health cramming little fish down his throat.  They gave him access to a little pool, but he really didn’t want to go swimming anymore.  The vet nudged him into the water and he proved that he COULD swim.  He just didn’t want to anymore.  He was willing to sit it out in his refrigerator, and thanks for all the fish.  I sent them $75, which is what they said it cost to care for him for a day.

Then some wiseacre with a boat said, “I’ll help you get rid of him.”  So they packed up his portable refrigerator and the TV cameras and his vet and off they sailed into the South Sea.  And Happy Feet thought it was okay going for a boat ride.  ”He was content to stand around watching us watching him,” someone said.  They fixed up a slide off the side of the boat and encumbered him with a glue-on tracking device.  But he really had no independent intention of going down that slide. Riding on the boat was fine with him.  He was all like, “I could be your German Shepherd type companion.”  He was happy to flap his penguin feet around on the deck of the boat and smell the open air.

If I were a guy with a boat sailing around on the South Sea and pretty easy access to fish to feed him, I’d have let him stay. But the TV cameras were there and they had to get the shot of him being released into the wild.  Someone said with quite a lot of authority that he should be “released,” even though he really didn’t seem to want to  go.  So the vet gave him a little boost with the toe of her boot because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  I guess you’d lose your moral authority or something if you just let him stay on the boat since he really didn’t want to swim anymore.

He lasted about a week.

That’s what I think was wrong.  I’d have let him choose his own way for reasons of his own.

“The King and I” is only a little different? 

It’s a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you’ll be taught.

As a teacher I’ve been learning –
You’ll forgive me if I boast —
And I’ve now become an expert,
On the subject I like most –

Grammar.

wildstrawberry: > many students have not been taught the fine art of critical thinking.>>

I do so agree with you.  Ain’t it awful?  It’s amazing that our species made it down out of the trees before Aristotle came along.  

I suspect that not many here would be interested, but I think this article is one of the better ones I’ve read on the subject:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=188304

Or, just possibly, “Give Al Gore and I a chance” is standard formal Arkansas English.

Level of formality does not negate the grammaticality (i.e., intelligibility to a native speaker of the language) of a synonymous statement at a different level of formality.  What does “grammaticality” MEAN if a common expression used routinely by native speakers of a language is declared “ungrammatical” depending on whether the speaker is among friends or on stage.  It don’t make no sense.  Either you know damned well what I mean when I say “it don’t make no sense” or you don’t.  If you really, truly think I MEAN to say “it does make sense” when I say quite clearly “it don’t make no sense,” then we have different and inconsistent understandings of the word “grammaticality” and “meaning.”

As a purely descriptive statement about the language we share, I am happy to tell you that “whom cares?” is ungrammatical because native speakers of English do not use the expression.

When an educated speaker says things like “Ain’t it the truth?” for the purpose of deflating pomposity, every native speaker of the language understands the expression and knows what it means, including the part about deflating pomposity.  You may not be able to articulate clearly what you know, but you DO know it.  That’s what grammaticality means: what native speakers know about their language.

If Bill Clinton says, “Ain’t it the truth?” in response to a statement by a constituent from Arkansas, that person KNOWS that Clinton doesn’t ordinarily use the expression (why not? because it is condemned in the schools even though it is openly used in the community).  They also know that Clinton is not talking down to them.

If Clinton said “Whom cares?” a native speaker of English would be  confused.  It doesn’t make sense … at  several levels of the meaning of meaning.

We DO make errors, and they can be studied and analyzed and discussed endlessly.  If we had to MEMORIZE language rules or apply our CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS in order to produce a sentence, we would be mute and the question would be moot.

Indeed there isn’t, Magyar Úr , and Szervusz!

       It is a good thing it is cases in English which have triggered some of these assertions of strong traditional but not very considered or linguistically informed pronouncements and prattle about “good” or “proper” grammar.   If it were what I take to be your either native or ancestral language, they’ld have some twenty or so cases to deal with, one of them the associative case, often used where English would use Nouns or Pronouns with coordinating conjunctions.  Or they could fight their case wars and proclaim that ”objects must be in the accusative” in Magyarul’s distant cousin, Finnish, where there are around 14 or so cases, including a nominative, an accusative, a genitive, and a partitive, and where more direct objects are in the partitive than the accusative, and about as many direct objects are in the nominative as in the accusative.

My experience is that German speakers honour that rule more often in the breach than in the observance. Probably one of these phenomena that begin around Hannover, travelling northwards ;-)

(I mean the non-inflection of words in film titles. The du/Sie bit is a whole nother issue.)

 ”The plural of  is Dummkopf is Dummköpfe!”

In German, that’s true; not in English, unless you’d also insist on source-language plurals and, for that matter, capitalization and diacriticals for e.g. kindergarten, chablis, vodka, kielbasa, pilsner, . . .

Probably the best known (here in Hungary) instance of using nominative case when accusative is called for is in the film The Usual Suspects. All nouns, including names, take accusative endings when receiving the action of a verb. The hospital scene has the burnt sailor saying “Láttam Keyser Soze” (I saw Keyser Soze). Strictly it should be “Láttam Keyser Sozet”. Couldn’t get the same interest in it as this thread has, though…

Well, it certainly interests me.  In Finnish there’ s a class of verbs whose objects are nominative, and some additional variables, but I wasn’t aware of any instances in Hungarian where the  { -(O)t} accusative suffix wasn’t used.  And since the object is a proper name, we would suppose it was definite but since in the past 1st person the definite and indefinite object conjugations of the verb are identical, there’s no indication in the sailor’s speech that that might have been a factor.  It would be interesting to know whether, had the sailor been using the nonpast, whether he would have said

      ??Látok  Keyser Soze.      ’I see Keyser Soze.’

instead of the expected 

         Látom Keyser Sozet. 

 Curious. Thanks for the example.

On some of the threads in this Lingua Franca blog, there are a fair number of commenters who seem to think grammar is not an empirical matter on which any actual data could possibly bear but rather seem to conceive it as a matter of philosophical speculation, universal logic, and /or morality and social propriety.

 Oh. Duh. Well, thanks for spelling it out for me. One of those days . . .

I only just spotted your reply about látok/látom. My guess is that it was the director/script writer’s decision to use the uninflected form of Soze. For all but Hungarian speakers it would introduce a new name for the audience to absorb if the accusative ending was added, though the difference between the direct and indirect object verbs form would be irrelevant. From their accents the actors seemed to be Hungarian speakers but not to have lived in Hungary for a while or at all – maybe even 2nd generation immigrants to the US.