And I
Posted: January 4th, 2007 | Author: emma | Filed under: misc, nerdiness | 1 Comment »Prescriptive grammarians would say that uses of “<any noun phrase> and I” as labels to pictures are completely ungrammatical; they should instead use “and me” in place of “and I”. /me wonders, though, about “the King and I”. Technically, it’s ambiguous as to whether or not this is prescriptively ungrammatical since the title could be referring to an act that both parties partook in. But it’s probably meant in the picture label sense, which is funny to me because I wonder how many people have stopped to wonder if they should be saying “and I” or “and me” and base their decision upon the title of that movie.
Prescriptive grammarians would say that uses of “ and I†as labels to pictures are completely ungrammatical; they should instead use “and me†in place of “and Iâ€.
Depends on the prescriptive grammarian. The older-school ones tended towards recommending the case analysis of old-school Indo-European in general, and in particular that of Latin, Greek (and German, since German’s everyday use of case has remained in place more than it has in English and the Romance languages). In that analysis “the King and I†is correct; free-standing names take the nominative, when they’re not taking the vocative. (See “Also known as†here, or the translation of the title of a recent Warner film as ‚Das häßliche Entlein und ich.‘)
A presciptive grammarian of a more recent generation, the kind that writes good stuff over at Language Log, pays lots of attention to the data, and would be uncomfortable being called a prescriptive grammarian, would say “the King and I†is stilted and doesn’t reflect how the vast majority of its speakers use the language, and since what is used is the ultimate measure of the correct in language, that is a strong argument for it being incorrect. They would hopefully consider the thing further, though, and say that (if what you’re talking about is related to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical) since that the title character is a 19th-century English governess—who would prefer the old-school analysis above—“the King and I†reflects what she would say.