Has anyone else noticed Barack Obama saying that Reverend Wright married "Michelle and I"?

When people make that mistake, it seems like they are trying to sound educated but end up sounding awful. It just grates on me.

I hadn't noticed, but that is, unfortunately, a common error, even in educated people. Worse is the usage of "I" in such phases as "It was given to John and I." When I hear that, I actually wince.

I know proper grammar is still being taught. I just wish it was still being learned.

Edited to fix (Gasp!) a mistake in verb tense

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,

Last week, I heard Mike Barnicle say "between you and I" on "Morning Joe."

Several years ago, I actually emailed "Days of Our Lives" about their mistakes. I guess the writer didn't know any better.

Languages are living entities; they evolve and change. If they didn't, we'd be speaking something closer to how Chaucer spoke. This particular case, substituting the nominative for the accusative or dative has been around a long time. My own speculation is that it is an example of hypercorrection derived from the opposite error, as in "John and me went to the store." When it comes to languages today's "error" is tomorrow's "norm."

So, you're saying that, for all intensive purposes, some day it really will be a doggy dog world. Frightening.

Stephen Pinker mentions this in The Language Instinct. I don't have the book with me right now, but (as far as I remember) he says that these phrases, 'Michelle and I' (or 'Michelle and me', as a subject), tend to be unconsciously treated as single units - prefabricated pieces of speech - and so don't change.

Adjective clauses can't describe object pronouns (I don't know who thought that rule up) and so "It is I who did it" is correct. "Reverend Wright married Michelle and I, who were very happy" would also be correct, maybe. That formal structure is maybe what gives people the idea that "...and I" is somehow more correct (that or getting clumped on the ear for saying "Him and me went...".

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So, you're saying that, for all intensive purposes, some day it really will be a doggy dog world. Frightening.

I'd say most people now use both folk etymologies to the exclusion of the "correct" forms.

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Reverend Wright married "Michelle and I"?

Another possibility is that, consciously or otherwise, he was trying to avoid the inherent ambiguity of the verb "to marry":

She married me. (We are man and wife now)

He married Michelle and me. (He's a bisexual polygamist)

I guess it's similar to saying "Rock and roll isn't what it used to be" or "Fish and chips is fattening". Those phrases are naturally treated as units, as if they were single words.

Maybe it's easier to pronounce "Michelle 'n' I" than "Michelle 'n' me", which has too many 'n's and 'm's.

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Those phrases are naturally treated as units, as if they were single words.

This is analogous to the use of plural verbs for singular collectives: Parliament are in session. Italy are a great team.

' That, heedless of grammar, they all cried "That's him!" ' [The Jackdaw of Rheims R.H. Barham 'The Ingoldsby Legends']

'They' were the astonished clergy who'd just seen the jackdaw who stole the Cardinal's ring.In this line the humorous poet takes a passing shot at the grammarians and pedants of his day ( he lived 1788-1845) . No doubt a grammarian would have cried 'That's he!'

Grammar is all very well, but much of it consists of rules invented by grammarians for grammarians.

There must be times when ' married Michelle and I 'sounds better than 'married Michelle and me', an example being already given above i.e. where 'Michelle and I' governs what follows '...who are happily married '.

That Barack Obama says it because he is trying to sound educated ("it seems like they [people] are trying to sound educated": Dixie) is so sweet Imagine, a black man who is a graduate of Harvard Law School, past president of the Harvard Law Review, the finest orator of the moment, trying to sound educated

DG's examples of folk etymologies reminded me that a post from way back had a link to other examples. Finally found it. Contributed by Paul (known as Piano1 on Jeeves).

http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html

Really... I mean really... after the current president's complete obliterationism of the English language, we are really going to mention that "Michelle and I" should be "Michelle and me?"

I tend to believe that English needs to evolve into a less complicated language. We could easily drop some of the silly rules and everyone would still understand each other quite well (or even quite good.)

When I was murdering the Spanish language to some friends recently, I was told quite kindly, "Just keep going, you aren't speaking perfectly but we understand what you are saying." And really that was all I wanted to achieve.

There are many nits to pick but there are also some serious issues.

I found that Pinker reference, and it's way too long to type out here - it's on page 405 of the paperback edition, if you have it (and if you don't, why not ?). He cites the linguist Joseph Edmonds as having gone into the issue raised in the original post in even greater detail. Anyway, they conclude there is a logic to using phrases like "Me and Michelle" as a subject or "Michelle and I" as an object.

Nitpicking the grammar of spoken English is a futile exercise, anyway (except in the case of someone like Bush, when it's funny, or you actually have to guess what it might have been that he meant to say).

In some ways, spoken English is like the very rough first draft of a piece of written English - with all the typos, glitches, blind alleys and changes of mind in plain view. Spoken English also has its own rules, not often codified into grammar books, but just as rigid in their own way; judging spoken English by the rules of written English is like having a cricket umpire at a baseball game.

Edit - someone has had a stab at summarising p405 of 'The Language Instinct'; wongaBlog - Language Mavens

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I tend to believe that English needs to evolve into a less complicated language.

Ami,

Grammatically, English is one of the least complicated languages in the world. Compare with Anglo-Saxon, Old English. It has jettisoned cases, gender, 2nd person forms, reduced its present tense verb forms to 2, its past forms to 1. The grammar of English is not why it is a difficult language to learn.

The current fashion in pedantry here is to complain about constructions such as 'meet with' and 'join with' on the ground that the verb alone suffices.

Is there a difference between 'Gordon Brown met with the President' and 'Gordon Brown met the President' or 'Join me in prayer' and 'Join with me in prayer' ? It's submitted that there is.And 'Gordon Brown met up with the President' is different yet.We are not likely to say or write 'Join up with me in prayer' because 'up' brings a nuance which we are not likely to need.

It is these subtle "add ons" that confuse non-English speakers. I would submit that there is a difference between "meet" and "meet with." As if that weren't enough, what's the difference between "to burn up" and "to burn down"?

Indeed, JR.A simple verb like 'wash' may have at least three specific meanings created by them, here 'wash up', 'wash down', 'wash over'.Explaining those is easy. That 'meet' is the action of meeting, 'meet with' suggests a meeting of some length, a conference or dialogue, and 'meet up with' usually suggests a pre-arranged meeting with some intention of proceeding to some other place or to do business elsewhere, may tax the most able tutor.

Actually, phrasal verbs don't seem to be so complex for learners of English. It's basically a straightforward (though difficult) question of remembering vocabulary, which is more of a pain in the case of phrasal verbs because the particles themselves are so arbitrary (the opposite of 'plug in'? Er.. unplug. Why can you both fill in and fill out a form?). But it is mostly about memorising.

Maybe most languages have verbs, or forms of verbs, with subtly different meanings. I'm struggling with 'give' in Japanese at the moment, for instance - there seem to be different words depending on the occasion and who's giving what to whom.

What has most ESL students waving the white flag is article usage - 'the' and 'a' and the countless, contradictory rules for their use.

Talking of simplicity, one of my students tells me that Thai has no tenses. You simply say "I go yesterday / I go today / I go tomorrow" (interesting that that would actually still be understandable in English). No wonder she has difficulty with things like the difference between 'I waited for an hour' and 'I have waited for an hour', or the lack of difference between 'I had done it before he arrived' and 'I did it before he arrived'.

On the other hand, before we decide that Thai should be the new lingua franca, it's a tonal language.

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What has most ESL students waving the white flag is article usage - 'the' and 'a' and the countless, contradictory rules for their use.

Yes, articles can be a pain. But that works the other way for English speakers studying a foreign language. As do the verbals. We take a verb like "to look," add a preposition and we get

to look for, at, around, through, over, up, on, etc., while many languages have separate verbs.