Don't Be Afraid To Use "Me"

In my introductory blog from December 6, 2011 ("Following David Brinkley's Lead"), I wrote that one of the topics I planned to write about was grammar. Immediately the old Johnny Mercer song "Fools Rush In" comes to mind. "Fools rush in, where wise men fear to tread." The obvious risk is that when someone writes about grammar, there'd better be no grammatical error in the piece or else all credibility is lost. I am going to play the part of the fool, and periodically tread into the topic anyway. This is my first such blogging effort. When I'm done writing I will proof read it an extra time, hoping to spot any error before pushing the "Publish" button. Since my blog entries are usually inundated with comments (cough! cough!), I'm sure the Grammar Police will let me know if I screw up.

I have found that many people avoid using the personal pronoun "me" and, instead, substitute the personal pronoun "I," even though in some situations the result is a grammar faux pas. I attribute this to two likely causes. First, when they were in school it was probably drilled into them that you never use "me" as the subject of a sentence. For example, you would not write or say, "Me and my mother went shopping." Instead, the sentence should be, "My mother and I went shopping." Unfortunately, the concept of cases, in particular nominative and objective cases, was never taught, never learned, or forgotten. A word being used as a subject or as a predicate nominative is in the nominative case. A word being used as a direct object, an indirect object or the object of a preposition is in the objective case. The word "I" is nominative case; the word "me" is objective case.

That leads me to the second cause of the confusion. It is most likely true that one cannot recognize the object of a preposition unless she knows a preposition when she sees one. [An aside: My Uniform Commercial Code professor, Doug Heidenreich, always preferred to use "she" instead of "he" or "he and she" or "s/he," and I am following suit.] The problem with preposition recognition is that, unlike other parts of speech, there is no great definition for the word "preposition." For example, a noun is defined as "a person place or thing." An adjective is "a word that describes or modifies a noun." A verb is "a word that shows action or a state of being/existing." Definitions for pronouns, adverbs, interjections and conjunctions are similarly easy to remember because they are concise. The same cannot be said for a preposition. Check out this definition of "preposition," as described on Dictionary.com:

"any member of a class of words found in many languages that are used before nouns, pronouns, or other substantives to form phrases functioning as modifiers of verbs, nouns, or adjectives, and that typically express a spatial, temporal, or other relationship."

All I can say after reading that definition is, "Huh?"

In view of the above, it is my contention that the only way, or at least the BEST way, to recognize a preposition is to memorize a list of them. Although there may be dozens of words which, arguably, have at one time or another been used as a preposition, if you memorize the following list of 28 words you will be good to go for over 95% of the times when a preposition comes into play. That list is as follows:

about, above, across, after, against, among, around, at
before, behind, beside, between
by, down, during, except, for, from,
in, near, of, off,
through, to, toward,
under, up, with

Sure, you could come up with a few more. What about "into" or "since"? Okay, include those words along with any other of your favorites if you'd like. The point is, you would be well advised to memorize the list. Why? Because (again) we can't tell if a word is the object of a preposition unless we recognize the preposition itself. If you have a choice between "I" and "me" following a preposition, please opt for "me." Examples: Ronald went with Justin and me to the game. Veronica said that the best present she received was the one from Betty and me.

Those of you who are astute readers might wonder why I broke up the list of 28 words into six lines. The answer is that I have borrowed that strategy from my sixth grade teacher at St. Joe's in Libertyville, Sister Jane. She made us memorize one line a day. After six days, we had them down. That was fifty-three years ago, and I can still rattle them off! Yes, I am sold on the theory that memorizing the list is easier and more practical than memorizing the convoluted definition.

In conclusion, be on the lookout for prepositions, and if the situation calls for objective case, be sure to use "me" instead of "I."