Booher's Rules of Business Grammar - Dianna Booher 2009

“Just between you and i”
Pesky pronouns: The understudies

Pronouns never have starring roles in sentences; instead, they are stand-ins for nouns. You can say, “Eldora has hired all four of those new managers” or “She has hired all four of them.” You can say, “Brunhilda’s workstation always looks like a cyclone hit Brunhilda’s workstation” or “Her workstation always looks like a cyclone hit it.”

In the theater, of course, an understudy plays only one role—not three. That is, if he stands in for the Duke of Featherbone, he can’t also play the role of the Princess Prianna. The same is true for pronouns. Because of their physical characteristics, they can play only a limited number of roles. They can stand in for the subject or an object of a sentence, but not both.

Therein lies the crux of the problem—matching the understudy to the appropriate role in the sentence.

22. “Just between you and i”

THE CASE FOR OBJECTIVE PRONOUNS

As the owner of a communication training company, I’ve literally been reading other people’s mail for 27 years. By far, the most frequently misused pronoun is the one in a sentence like this:

Incorrect:

Just between you and I, we all know who runs this place.

Let’s continue the understudy analogy further: The understudy pronoun I is playing the wrong role here. Hearing a pronoun error like this is equivalent to watching a play and having a 70-year-old male run on stage to play the part of the teenage girl.

Here are the actors that can stand in for subjects: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, and whoever.

These are the actors that can stand in for objects (primarily objects of prepositions and direct and indirect objects): me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, and whomever.

You’ll notice that you and it can play either role—subjects or objects. They make the big bucks. Also, we have a whole slew of indefinite pronouns that can play both roles: anyone, everybody, none, some, all, many, one, them, these, those, this, that, what, any, each, both, nobody, few, others, several, and anyone. For the most part, these don’t cause problems. It’s the actors that play only one role that create the headaches.

Back to “Just between you and I, we all know who runs this place”: the I is standing in for an object of the preposition between, but the pronoun I can accept only “subject” roles. So the proper noun in this sentence is me. (For some reason, people seem to think that I sounds more sophisticated than me.)

Correct:

Just between you and me, we all know who runs this place.

Incorrect:

Please call Ebeneezer and I with the test results. (object of the verb—me has to be the stand-in here)

He mailed multiple invoices to Percival, three clients, and I. (object of the preposition—me has to be the stand-in here)

Leave the other people out of a sentence and let your ear do the work. The correct pronoun will become obvious. You would never say, “Please call I with the test results” or “He mailed multiple invoices to I.”

Correct:

Please call me with the test results.

He mailed multiple invoices to me.

Memory tip

Omit the other people in the sentence, and trust your ear to select the right objective pronoun.