2020-10-13 ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด I – I – Me

2020-10-14

ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด I – I – Me – Myself

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Dictionary.com

ออกเสียง I = ‘AHY’

ออกเสียง Me = ‘MEE’

ออกเสียง Myself = ‘mahy-SELF’

Dictionary.com

GRAMMAR NOTES FOR ME

A traditional rule governing the case of personal pronouns

after forms of the verb to be is that the nominative

or subjective form ( I; she; he; we; they ) must be chosen.

Some 400 years ago, owing to the feeling that

the post verb position in a sentence is object rather than subject territory,

me and other objective pronouns (him; her; us; them )

began to replace the subjective forms after be,

so that It is I became It is me.

Today such constructions— It's me. That's him. It must be them.

—are almost universal in speech, the context in which they usually occur.

In formal speech or edited writing, the subjective forms are used:

It was I who first noticed the problem.

My brother was the one who called our attention to the problem,

but it wasn't he who solved it.

It had been she at the window, not her husband.
Me and other objective forms have also replaced the subjective forms in speech in constructions like Me neither; Not us; Who, them?

and in comparisons after as or than:

She's no faster than him at getting the answers.

When the pronoun is the subject of a verb that is expressed,

the nominative forms are used:

Neither did I. She's no faster than he is at getting the answers. See also than.

When a verb form ending in -ing functions as a noun,

it is traditionally called a gerund:

Walking is good exercise. She enjoys reading biographies.

Usage guides have long insisted that gerunds, being nouns,

must be preceded by the possessive form of the pronouns or nouns

(my; your; her; his; its; our; their; child's; author's)

rather than by the objective forms (me; you; him; her; it; us; them):

The landlord objected to my (not me ) having guests late at night.

Several readers were delighted at the author's (not author) taking a stand on the issue.

In standard practice, however, both objective and possessive forms appear before gerunds.

Possessives are more common in formal edited writing,

but the occurrence of objective forms is increasing;

in informal writing and speech objective forms are more common:

Many objections have been raised to the government (or government's) allowing lumbering in national parks.

“Does anyone object to me (or my) reading this report aloud?” the moderator asked.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Diction

usage

Me is used in many constructions where strictgrammarians prescribe I.

This usage is not so much ungrammatical as indicative of the shrinking range of the nominative form:

me began to replace I sometime around the 16th century largely because of the pressure of word order.

I is now chiefly used as the subject of an immediately following verb.

Me occurs in every other position: absolutely

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

me or I?: Usage Guide

Pronoun

Me is used in many constructions where strict grammarians prescribe I.

This usage is not so much ungrammatical as indicative of the shrinking range of the nominative form: me began to replace I sometime around the 16th century largely because of the pressure of word order. I is now chiefly used as the subject of an immediately following verb.

Me occurs in every other position: absolutely who, me? emphatically me too , and after prepositions, conjunctions, and verbs, including be. come with me you're as big as me it's me

Almost all usage books recognize the legitimacy of me in these positions, especially in speech; some recommend I in formal and especially written contexts after be and after as and than when the first term of the comparison is the subject of a verb.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Usage Notes

'It is I' or 'It is Me'?

The Queen, the Predicate Nominative, and Me, er, I

Pretend with us, if you will:

You're calling a queen. You two are chummy, and you have the number that goes directly to the telephone located on the table next to the armchair in which she is sitting and awaiting your call.

She answers and says, "Hello?"

You say: "May I speak to the Queen, please?"

She replies, "This is ___."

And there we will stop: what does she say?

She might choose to answer with her title:

"This is the Queen." Or she could go the pronoun route.

Being queen and all, that might mean going full royal:

"This is We." Or would it be "This is Us"?

(We're assuming the caps, but that's really up to her.)

But what if she prefers a plebeian (and lowercase) pronoun?

Would her answer be "This is she"? Or "This is her"?

It all depends on how she regards that little verb is.

Such a common verb, but even queens (English-speaking ones, anyway)

have to use it.

Its infinitive form is be, but it of course

has other forms too: am, are, was, were, being, been.

Be is the most common of the linking verbs

(also called copulas or copulative verbs).

A linking verb is a kind of verb that, instead ofexpressing some kind of action

as verbs like "run" and "digress" do, connects a subject with an adjective

(or adjective phrase) or noun (or noun phrase) that describes or identifies that subject.

For example, in

"The Queen is waiting for my call,"

the linking verb is connects the subject (the Queen)

with a phrase that describes the subject in her anticipatory state.

For a long time, grammarian-types asserted that when you've got a subject that is followed by a linking verb,

the thing that comes after the linking verb (the adjective or noun) should be in the nominative case

—that is, in the form that is used in the subject position.

We can think of the assertion like this: a linking verb is akin to an equals sign.

Just as we would say "She is the Queen," we must also say "The Queen is she."

There's a fancy grammatical term for this: predicate nominative.

It refers specifically to the adjective (or adjective phrase) or noun (or noun phrase) that follows a linking verb to complete its meaning and is required to be in the nominative case.

Most of the time we don't have to think about whether what follows a linking verb is in the nominative case or the objective case (the form used in the object position).

In "The Queen is very funny" and "The Queen is an excellent conversationalist"

the adjective and noun phrases following the linking verb have the same form whether they're in the nominative or the objective. But when we want to use a pronoun after the linking verb, we must make a choice.

If the predicate nominative holds, the Queen will say "This is she" (or "This is We,"

if she's going with the vaunted pronoun that sovereigns sometimes employ).

This is connected via the linking verb is to the pronoun that identifies the speaker in the nominative case.

If the Queen answers instead "This is her," she is denying the predicate nominative and treating the pronoun that is connected via the linking verb is as though it were coming after a regular old verb such as like, as in "I like her."

And what about the rest of us? Should we deny the predicate nominative, or embrace it?

The answer is, we assure you, purely a matter of style.

While there was some heated debate about the matter in the 18th century—mostly a single it is me defender was quickly outnumbered by some influential it is I people—by the early part of the 20th century the majority of those who make recommendations about such things were acknowledging that it is me is perfectly fine, especially in informal use. Both forms have existed for centuries, with it is me tending to appear in more relaxed contexts even long ago. Which means you—and the Queen—can choose whichever you prefer whenever you like.

The predicate nominative of course comes into play with other pronouns as well, and when it does it often sounds particularly well-suited for the regal among us:

"If I were he …"; "I heard a knock—it might be they …"; "hoping it was she …"

Without the predicate nominative we have "If I were him …"; "it might be them …"; "hoping it was her …"

Again, the choice is up to you. As for us, we reserve the right to save the former exclusively for our confabs with the Queen.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Usage Notes

When Is It 'You and I' or 'You and Me'?

Some pronoun advice for you (and her and him and them).

Native speakers are pronoun experts.

We (we is a pronoun here referring tonative speakers including yours truly) understand them (them is a pronoun referring to pronouns) easily and employ them (there it is again; it is another pronoun, here referring to the word them) without much need for examination.

(A reminder: a pronoun is a word used instead ofa noun or noun phrase that has either already been mentioned or does not need to be named specifically.)

Pronoun use is in fact proof of our facility with the language—we so often get them right, and they're not simple things. No one says "Us so often get them right," or "We so seldom get they wrong." But in a particular type of environment, pronoun use can wander from its predicted territory, as writer and humorist James Thurber noted:

I have been planning a piece on personal pronouns and the death of the accusative. Nobody says "I gave it to they," but "me" is almost dead, and I have heard its dying screams from Bermuda to Columbus: "He gave it to Janey and I." ... My cousin Earl Fisher said it to me in Columbus, "Louise and I gave it to he and she last Christmas."
— letter, 25 June 1956

Thurber has a point, and more than half a century later we're still seeing the same kind of thing that bothered him so much. Let's take a closer look at Thurber's objections. In both of the examples he gives, the questionable pronouns are members of a compound phrase—that is, a phrase that has more than one distinct part. In the first it's Janey and I:

He gave it to Janey and I.

What's wrong with this sentence? It might look perfectly fine at first, but if we simplify the compound phrase an odd pronoun choice becomes apparent:

He gave it to Janey. He gave it to I.

The first part works, but "He gave it to I" isn't idiomatic English. After a preposition like to we expect the accusative pronoun me, rather than the nominative pronoun I: "He gave it to me."

The same is true after other prepositions as well:

They were with me.

It isn't for me.

It's not about me.

When we rewrite these with compound phrases we get the following:

He gave it to Janey and me.

They were with Janey and me.

It isn't for Janey and me.

It's not about me and Janey.

Note that there's nothing ungrammatical about putting me first,

as in the last example;

it's simply considered more polite to put oneself in the final position.

Thurber's second example is:

Louise and I gave it to he and she last Christmas.

"Louise and I" is fine, as we see if we separate the first compound phrase:

Louise gave it …; I gave it…

But if we separate the second compound phrase,

the pronouns become unidiomatic:

We gave it to he last Christmas. We gave it to she last Christmas.

It's the accusative—him and her in this case—that's called for:

We gave it to him last Christmas. We gave it to her last Christmas.

The accusative is also called for when the pronoun is the object of the verb

—that is, when it receives the action of the verb, such as her in "I saw her."

Again, things get complicated when the pronoun is part of a compound phrase,

as in this reworked version of Thurber's second example:

We gave he and she the book last Christmas.

When we separate the compound phrase, a similar situation arises:

We gave he the book last Christmas. We gave she the book last Christmas.

"We gave he the book" and "we gave she the book" don't sound right; the accusative once again comes to the rescue:

We gave him the book last Christmas. We gave her the book last Christmas.

We won't agree with Thurber that the accusative is dead—phrases like "tell me" and "call him" and "show her" and "hear them" continue to be used with unfettered frequency—but we do agree that compound phrases sometimes make people choose pronouns differently. If you want to keep the Thurber crowd happy, separate the compounds to see which pronoun is the word you're looking for. In speech it may not matter to your audience much of the time, but in writing especially, you'll be judged more favorably if you keep the accusative in its place.

But there's more, of course, to this discussion. If pronoun use is proof of facility with the language, why do so many competent users of English confuse them in compound phrases?

One common theory is that people choose I instead of me in cases like

"He gave it to Janey and I"

because they've been taught that me isn't correct in cases like

"It is me" and "My friend and me agree";

they assume, so the theory goes,

that there's something wrong with me,

especially when joined to someone else by and,

and so they use I instead.

It's a reasonable enough theory

—and maybe it holds true for some people

—but it doesn't explain the matter entirely because our evidence of [someone] and I

in the object position goes back to the 16th century, about 150 years before anyone was instructing anyone else about these things.

Another theory has the added bonus of dealing also with the likes of "Louise gave it to he and she." It's from linguist Noam Chomsky, who, in his 1986 book Barriers, proposes that compound phrases like you and I and he and she are barriers to the assignment of grammatical case, meaning that their elements don't get assigned case individually, but that the phrase as a whole is what gets assigned case instead; the individual words in the phrase can look like they're in the object or subject position, or are even reflexive, i.e. myself, herself, or themselves. Chomsky's idea remains a theory, but it does do the job of explaining the phenomenon.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Usage Notes

'Between You and I'

Don't let this phrase stand between you and clear writing

Do you say “between you and me” or do you say “between you and I”?

If it is the latter, have you noticed people giving you funny looks, moving away from you on the bus, or threatening to physically harm you?

Because there are people out there who take grave exception to this particular turn of phrase, and they are very angry when they hear it.

What is it about “between you and I” that engenders such ire?

The short answer is that the speaker is using the subjective pronoun I after a preposition, rather than the objective me, and modern English grammar dictates that pronouns that follow a preposition such as between should be objective ones (me, you, us, him/her, it, them).

Many writers have used "between you and I" in their writing; however, most current usage guides will censure you if you use it. It's fine for casual speech, but should be avoided in edited prose.

The longer answer? Some people have suggested that the reason “between you and I” bothers so many people is that it is a hypercorrection (a grammatical error made through the attempt to avoid a different grammatical error, or an error made in an attempt to sound more educated), and hypercorrections tend to make people excessively wroth. This theory is largely based on the notion that people were spooked by being told that they should say “it is I,” rather than “it is me,” and so overcompensated by salting their language overmuch with the subjective I.

Other commentators on language have opined that some people use I instead of me because it has a more pleasant sound to it.

Perhaps the most famous (mis)use of “between you and I” occurs in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in which Antonio informs Bassanio in a letter that “all debts are cleared between you and I.” Shakespeare was but one of many writers of yore who employed the subjective rather than the objective case in this prepositional phrase. An 1878 issue of the journal Notes and Queries stated that “Between you and I is as thick and plentiful as the autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallambrosa," and offered the following examples (among many others).

Between you and I, I think him as odd … a fellow as you can do.
—Henry Fielding, The Virgin Unmasked, 1791

Whimsical … and, between you and I, none of the mildest of her sex.
—David Garrick, The Lying Valet, 1741

Then the music—so softly the cadences die,
So divinely, O Dolly, between you and I,
It’s as well for my peace that there’s nobody nigh.
—Thomas Moore, The Fudge Family in Paris, 1818

“Between you and I” was not only used by Britishauthors; it may be found in the writing of numerous American men and women of letters in the 18th and 19th centuries. Benjamin Franklin used it occasionally in his correspondence (although he wrote “between you and me” more frequently).

Indeed I had not the least Idea of any Agreement between you and I, either express’d or imply’d as you say, in any of its Articles….
—Benjamin Franklin, letter to David Hall, 14 Apr., 1767

Between you and I, the late Measures have been, I suspect, very much the King’s own, and he has in some Cases a great Share of what his Friends call Firmness.
—Benjamin Franklin, letter to William Franklin, 14 Jul., 1773

There is no doubt that “between you and I” violates traditional rules of grammar.

If one were to substitute a different subjective pronoun after between

(“this is a matter between they”) it would sound quite jarring to most of us.

But there is also no doubt that our language will occasionally assimilate incorrect usage, and over the course of time, come to accept it, if only begrudgingly and slowly.

An example of this may be found in the aforementioned phrase “it is me,” which was widely censured in the 19th century, and now bothers far fewer people than it used to. An early 20th century edition of Merriam-Webster’s New Unabridged Dictionary wrote of “it is me” that is “violates the grammatical rule of construction which calls for a predicate nominative after is; and it is now chiefly colloquial or dialect, but is justified by some good writers as being historically idiomatic.” Although using “it is me” instead of “it is I” may still bother some people, many usage guides now accept this as correct, especially in informalsettings.

This is not yet the case with “between you and I.” Most current usage guides (as well as many angry people on Twitter) are of the opinion that this usage diminishes the appearance of the user. Our own usage guide takes a somewhat more accepting position:

You are probably safe in retaining between you and I in your casual speech,

if it exists there naturally, and you would be true to life in placing it in the mouths of fictional characters.

But you had better avoid it in essays and other works of a discursive nature. It seems to have no place in modern edited prose.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994

For those who have short attention spans, here is a tl;dr limerick:

In the event that you wish to know why
You shouldn’t say it’s “between you and I,”
When this case is subjective
Instead of objective
You are making grammarians cry

Common Errors in English Usage Dictionary

In the old days when people studied traditional grammar,

we could simply say,

“The first person singular pronoun is “I”

when it’s a subject

and “me” when it’s an object,”

but now few people know what that means.

Let’s see if we can apply some common sense here.

The misuse of “I” and “myself” for “me”

is caused by nervousness about “me.”

Educated people know that

“Jim and me is goin’ down to slop the hogs,” is notelegant speech, not “correct.”

It should be “Jim and I” because if I were slopping the hogs alone I would never say “Me is going. . . .” So far so good.

But the notion that there is something wrong with “me” leads people to overcorrect and avoid it where it is perfectly appropriate.

People will say “The document had to be signed by both Susan and I”

when the correct statement would be, “The document had to be signed by both Susan and me.”

Trying even harder to avoid the lowly “me,” many people will substitute “myself,”

as in “The suspect uttered epithets at Officer O’ Leary and myself.”

“Myself” is no better than “I” as an object.

“Myself” is not a sort of all-purpose intensive form of “me” or “I.”

Use “myself” only when you have used “I” earlierin the same sentence:

“I am not particularly fond of goat cheese myself.”

“I kept half the loot for myself.”

All this confusion can easily be avoided

if you just remove the second party from the sentences where you feel tempted to use “myself” as an object or feel nervous about “me.”

You wouldn’t say, “The IRS sent the refund check to I,”

so you shouldn’t say “The IRS sent the refund check to my wife and I” either.

And you shouldn’t say “to my wife and myself.”

The only correct way to say this is,

“The IRS sent the refund check to my wife and me.”

Still sounds too casual? Get over it.

On a related point, those who continue to announce “It is I” have traditional grammatical correctness on their side, but they are vastly outnumbered by those who proudly boast “it’s me!”

There’s not much that can be done about this now.

Similarly, if a caller asks for Susan and Susan answers

“This is she,” her somewhat antiquated correctness

is likely to startle the questioner into confusion.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary

personal pronoun

noun each of the pronouns in English

(I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us, and them)

comprising a set that shows contrasts of person, gender, number, and case.

Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary

personal pronoun

noun

(grammar) any of the pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us, them

HELP NOTE

The use of me in the last three examples is correct in modern standard English.

I in these sentences would be considered much too formalfor almost all contexts, especially in BrE.

As a noun (also mi) (music) the third note of a MAJOR scale

American Heritage Dictionary

USAGE NOTE: The reflexive pronouns,

such as myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, and herself,

are often used as emphatic forms:

Like yourself, I have no apologies to make.

The practice is particularly common in compound phrases:

Mrs. Evans or yourself will have to pick them up at the airport.

These usages have been common in the writingof reputable authors for several centuries:

“Let me say to you and to myself in one breath, Cultivate the tree which you have found to bear fruit in your soil” (Henry David Thoreau).

The strongest criticism that can be made of these uses of reflexives

is that like other emphatic devices they may easily be overused,

and when the pronoun refers to the writer or speaker,

the result of the emphasis may be an implicationof pomposity or self-importance.

Random House Webster's Dictionary

Usage.

Questions are raised with certain uses of MYSELF and other - SELF forms

in place of the personal pronouns (I, me, you, etc.). MYSELF as a single subject

(Myself shall be the messenger) is mainlypoetic or literary.

As a simple nonreflexive object, the -SELF form is not uncommon in speech:

Since the letter was addressed to myself, I opened it.

Packages had come for everyone but themselves.

As part of a compound subject, object, or complement,

MYSELF and to a lesser extent the other - SELF forms

are common in informal speech and personal writing,

somewhat less common in more formal speech and writing:

Many friends welcomed my husband and myself back home.

His agent and himself spoke to the press.

Such forms are similarly used after as orthan in all varieties of speech and writing:

No contributors have been more generous than yourselves.

Many usage guides advise that these uses of the -SELF forms

are characteristic only of informal speech and should not occur in writing.

2020-10-13 ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด I – I – Me – Myself

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