This could have been called HowNotToSpeakEnglish?, but Brits' and Americans' languages are diverging enough that I think it's a good idea to begin to distinguish between them. (I don't foresee discussing anything specific to American, though.)
Don't use "I" except in the subject of a clause. Many people seem to think that the word "me" is uncool or sounds unlearned to use. Most of the time, at the end of some sentences, one hears the word "me" but occasionally, the word "I" can crop up where a less educated person might say "me". Many people found this odd and maybe a bit chic, because the users of the word "I" were usually very smart people. So, in an attempt to show the same chumminess with the language, and to imitate the smart people, using "I" at the end of a sentence seemed like a great idea to many.
Unfortunately, mimicing the smart people without understanding why "I" can be correct just makes one seem very stupid.
The word "I" is correct only in the subject of a clause. Nowhere else.
"The clerk gave ice-cream to Jill and I." Wrong! There is nothing special about adding "Jill and" to the sentence "The clerk gave ice-cream to I." Bah, that's horrible! The correct way to say that both Jill and the speaker received ice-cream is to say "The clerk gave ice-cream to Jill and me." Taking the potentially confusing "Jill and" out, we get a very natural sentence, "The clerk gave ice-cream to me." Isn't that much better?
How about this: "Jill likes chocolate more than I." ? This example is correct. The "more than I" prepositional phrase really contains a small sub-sentence "I", with the implied verb phrase "like chocolate": "Jill likes chocolate more than I like chocolate." To use "me" in the place of "I" is a completely different sentence; it then becomes "Jill like chocolate more than (Jill likes) me" -- which is entirely possible, as chocolate is very good, while I smell a little like cabbage.
"The clerk gave ice cream to us so that Jill and I could cool off." This is correct (though perhaps not the best possible example sentence). The clause we're considering is "Jill and I could cool off", but it exists in a larger universe, a containing sentence. There's one big sentence that has a noun ("The clerk"), a verb ("gave"), an object ("ice cream"), and an adverb phrase that modifies "gave" ("so that Jill and I could cool off"). That adverb phrase contains a prepositional phrase ("that Jill and I could cool off"), which has two parts, the preposition ("that") and its object, the independent clause (a small mini-sentence) "Jill and I could cool off". It doesn't matter that "I" is not in the subject of the large over-all sentence; that it is in the subject of its immediate containing sentence determines which, "I" or "me", to use. "Jill and I" is the subject and the phrase "could cool off" is the verb. It would have been wrong to say "The clerk gave ice cream to us so that Jill and me could cool off."
Remember this: "Me" and "I" are not interchangable. When one is correct, the other is incorrect. Consider both options when you're unsure, and choose the one that sounds best after you strip out all the extraneous bits.
Examples of incorrect usage that I've stumbled across:
"To beg the question" does not mean "to suggest the question". Begging the question is used to describe the position of using a predetermined answer to a question to pretend to build a sound answer for the question. It's a logical fallacy to use a conclusion-to-be-decided inside of the proof of the same question. Most people rarely encounter real begging of the question, but it's still wrong to misuse a phrase that has a very specific and real meaning to gesture at something completely different.
Examples of incorrect usage:
- "All of which begs the question, why not buy a motorbike?"
- "The thought of a hundred elephants-worth of water suspended in the sky begs another question — what keeps it up there?"
Avoid "Corporate Speech", language designed to seem to convey information but without actually doing so. It's also is a way to avoid responsibility for what it seems to say.
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