The Daily Complaint: The Problem Between You and I

… is that it’s between you and me and not you and I. It’s a simple thing.  Or should be.  You and I is an incorrect phrase when it follows a preposition and, yet, it prevails in language and, more insidiously, in popular music. So don’t feel bad (and it’s not don’t feel badly; that would mean that your sense of touch is impaired) if you recognize that you have been guilty of using “I” instead of “me” after a preposition.  You’re in good company if you’ve made this atrocious trespass on the English language (okay, so maybe it’s just a minor mistake).

Lady Gaga perpetuates this sentence destruction in her song You and I; Jessica Simpson actually has Between You and I as the title of a song [gasp]; and remember Eric Carmen of Dirty Dancing fame?  He sang the title song, Hungry Eyes, which includes the lyrics, “…feel the heat between you and I.”  Ai-yi-yi.  My kids can tell you that I’ve been heard to shout at the car radio during Gaga’s latest, “It’s me, me, me!” 

We’ve been conditioned to think that saying I when referring to ourselves is polite and correct no matter what comes before it.  Well, it’s not.  If your I is preceded in the sentence by a preposition (remember those: about, above, across, after, against, among, around, at before, behind, beside, between, beyond, by, down, during, for, through, with….well, you get the idea) then you have to go to objective case, which would be me.  I should know, I spent eight years in Catholic grade school and, well, I’m a language geek.  I know it’s a little obnoxious.  But it’s language.  It’s how we communicate.  Things like sentence structure and language composition matter.  It ain’t no small thing.  Is it?

Here’s a good little trick Sister Charles Helene taught me: Say the sentence with only the reference to yourself.  Would you say that the secret is for I?  Nope.  For me sounds right because it is right.

Join me.  Next time, you hear a singer singing I when it should be me, drown them out with your American Idol-esque rendition of "me, me, me."  It feels good…for you and me.