Is It 'You and I' or 'You and Me'?
Photo : fongbeerredhot ( Shutterstock )  Sometimes, no matter how one pours their heart out, if you flub your grammar, thats all someone is going to remember. This was the case when I wrote this post about how to decide when youre done having children, in which I shared my own experiences as a mother of one child, a former foster parent, and a woman who has had two miscarriages. Advertisement  A man (lets call him Daniel, because thats his name), read that post and wrote me to say:  I just stumbled over a question that loomed over my husband and I and had to cringe. Please, for the sake of your readers, make a difference between I and me  in this case, you meant to write over my husband and me, meaning the question loomed over your husband and over you at the same time. If you really need to write over my husband and I, then try adding easily helped him get over it with a fresh pot of coffee. In that case you would be the subject of that new clause and not dependent on some over, under or about, all of which require the word me. It must be somewhere in Strunk & White, but I dont have that here with me right now. Otherwise, I really enjoy your articles! It was hard for me to read this email with all those commas and periods outside of the quotation marks, but I powered through and considered his point. To start, I had to find it somewhat amusing that a fresh pot of coffee might have easily helped my husband come to some kind of conclusion about our not-so-growing family. (This was a thing we did not try, and its hard to not feel regret about that now.) But secondly, Daniel was rightand as someone who frequently writes posts about grammar, its only fair to have my own grammatical inadequacies corrected. (Plus, he did say he enjoys my articles, which endeared him to me. Thank you Daniel; I pledge to do better.) The simple rule I have always used for thisand for whatever reason did not apply in this caseis that ...and I is correct wherever youd just use I, and ...and me is correct wherever youd just use me. Thats because I is a subject pronoun (the thing doing the action in a sentence) and me is an object pronoun (the thing the action happens to), and theyre used as such whether they stand alone or are part of phrase. So we should say, Can you save a spot for my friends and me, not my friends and I, because me and my friends are the object of that sentence. And wed say, You and I are going to be late, because you and I are the subject. These same people would never say, Take a picture of I or Give it to I. They have an automatic understanding of the rules of English subject and object forms except in compound noun phrases. This isnt evidence of the woeful state of English language education. People, often quite literate people, have been doing this for centuries. More than 400 years ago, Shakespeare had a character in The Merchant of Venice say, All debts are cleared between you and I. His contemporary Ben Jonson wrote the line, Musco has been with my cousin and I all this day in Every Man in His Humour. Examples between then and now abound. The obvious fact is that the simple rule is not automatic, even if you grew up speaking English. It has to be learned, and not everyone learns it. Advertisement  So now weve learned it.