They Gave The Book To I

N.P.R., Paragon of Journalism, Champion of Education. Could your presenters and interviewees be Post Literate, too?  Yes indeed.  Might be the cut back by Congress...to the grade school budget.

If I hear someone say something like this one more time, "They gave the book to Meredith and I," I think I'm gonna scream!

Heard that yesterday from a film producer being interviewed on NPR.

Would anyone every say, "They gave the book to I?" No, I think not and neither would you.

Yet, as soon as someone's name is added to the list of book recipients in that sentence, speakers of Americanish think they should change the case of the personal pronoun from 'me' to 'I'.   Why?  The pronoun is still the object of the preposition 'to'.  The 'to' didn't suddenly disappear with the addition of the other person's name!

Personal pronouns  like 'me' and 'I' have a property called 'case' that indicates their function in a sentence.  Other kinds of words do, too, but this blog is about personal pronouns.

Our example, "They gave the book to I." sounds strange because the personal pronoun 'I' belongs in the subject of the sentence (the subjective case) but instead, it's been used behind the preposition 'to', which makes it an object that receives the 'action' of the preposition. That requires the pronoun to be in the Objective Case.   There are three cases in English:

Subjective - the pronoun acts as the subject in a sentence.
Objective -  the pronoun acts as the object, or receiver of action, from a verb or a preposition.
Possessive - the pronoun acts as the possessor of something.

Now don't let that scare you; you already know this stuff.  You were just, let us say, misled.

Many languages -- for example, Spanish, French, Romanian, Portuguese, German -- use more that three cases.  And the real kicker is that these languages require that the adjectives, nouns, pronouns and verbs all agree in Case, so you have to learn all the different case forms of the adjectives, nouns, pronouns and verbs, too.  Didn't know you had it so easy, did you?

But it's also not likely you'd hear speakers of these languages say a version of the following in their own tongue: "Me and Bob went to the party last week." Or, "Between you and I, Sharon spent all her money in Vegas." Both are examples of incorrect pronoun case.

Surprising to me, I increasingly hear this misuse in television and movie dialogues where one presumes that writers have some grounding in basic grammar; admittedly,  the director may be letting the actors improvise.  I've lately heard this misuse in English spoken in Australia, New Zealand and the UK; is this a demonstration of the reach of Americanish or English devolving?

Be glad you're not learning to  use the seven cases in Latin, although it would certainly make case assignment in English a piece of cake.

To review what you should have learned as a child:

Subjective Case Personal pronouns: I, you, he, she, it, we, you (all), they.
Objective Case Personal pronouns: me, you, him, her, it, us, you (all), them.
Possessive Case Personal pronouns: my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, their, theirs

Here's a list of prepositions that require inflections in case other than Subjective:

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/prepositions-list.htm.

I'd love to say you can forget about getting a job in TV, radio and print if you haven't mastered this grade school grammar. but the truth is that you probably can, but you're not getting the anchor slot. Yet.