zompist bboard

The lyrics to a recently released song "In the end, it's him and I".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA7AIQw-7Ms

That sounds strange to me. Mixing an object pronoun and a subject pronoun. I'd expect "it's him and me", or in really formal speech maybe "it's he and I". "It's him and I" sounds strange.

I think this is just euphony.....can't play the song but in speech it'd be /hIm@n@i/ which is CVCVCV,unlike the other 2 forms.

Fooge wrote:That sounds strange to me. Mixing an object pronoun and a subject pronoun. I'd expect "it's him and me", or in really formal speech maybe "it's he and I". "It's him and I" sounds strange.

Sounds pretty normal to me. The educational system has successfully spread hypercorrect "...and I" in objective contexts, but even the most conservative grammar teachers have failed to find any customers for "it's he".

As a sidenote, "It's me and him" sounds more natural to me than "It's him and me".

Yeah, a lot of speakers in my experience treat "and I" as the only possible way to include a first person pronoun in this construction. I have definitely heard "him and I" in speech a fair few times.

Yep. Basic My-Wife-And-I-ism

Yeah, this looks to me like the output of what Nicholas Sobin called the "and I" virus: basically just a rule rewriting "and me" to "and I" regardless of context. See on Language Log "Patterns of prestigious deviance". It's quite common and it's been around for a while. English "case" is vestigial enough that it doesn't really behave like the cases of a language like German.

Sumelic wrote:... basically just a rule rewriting "and me" to "and I" regardless of context.

What I was exposed to was an instruction to convert 'Me and X' to 'X and I', as a politeness rule. "I and my king" (or "ego et meus rex") is well known to be potentially lethal. As "me and X" is commoner as subject than as object in uncorrected English, the rule is an oversimplification that has got out of hand.

Richard W wrote:

Sumelic wrote:... basically just a rule rewriting "and me" to "and I" regardless of context.

What I was exposed to was an instruction to convert 'Me and X' to 'X and I', as a politeness rule. "I and my king" (or "ego et meus rex") is well known to be potentially lethal. As "me and X" is commoner as subject than as object in uncorrected English, the rule is an oversimplification that has got out of hand.

Hence my use of the term "hypercorrection" above.