I know that I told you that we weren’t going to “harp” on grammar, but there is one little spot where I cannot help myself: “You and I” versus “You and me”.

Now as an English learner you might hear people use these two combinations incorrectly many times on television, on the street, even occasionally in books (alas self-publishing has removed the editor from so many publications, so many books are published without adequate editing).

Oddly, native English speakers manage to use BOTH “you and I” and “you and me” incorrectly.

There is a grammatical rule for this,: “you and I” refers to a subject and “you and me” refers to an object, but people rarely mess up the difference between “we”, a subject and “us” an object, so it’s a little baffling as to why there is such a problem with native English speakers understanding the proper usage of “you and I” and “you and me”. By the way, this is not an American vs. British thing – there are as many English, Scots, Irish, Canadian, Australian, New Zealanders, etc. who mess this up as do we Americans!).

The generally accepted explanation for this is that as children we make mistakes and are corrected:

Child: Mom, Jimmy and me are going to the store
Mom: Sweetie, you mean Jimmy and I are going to the store.

Okay, so Mommy corrected us, and suddenly Jimmy and me is wrong. Thus the next time we ask:

“Mom, can you bake some cookies for Jimmy and I?”

Maybe Mom doesn’t even correct us this time. Maybe she does, but doesn’t know how to explain the difference to a 5 year old, so it goes over our little heads. Whatever the reason, by the time many native speakers are in school and learning English in class, the mistakes are so ingrained into their own speech patterns, that being taught what is right is overruled by the colloquial usage.

While I might lead a sheltered life, I’ve actually never heard anyone say:

Mom, us are going to the store.

Or

Mom, can you bake some cookies for we?

So, if in your native language, you understand the difference between subjects and objects, you can understand the difference between “you and I” and “you and me”.

A second theory about why otherwise savvy speakers get this wrong is that because “you and me” is the usage that is most often corrected to “you and I”, and people start to wrongly assume that any time there are two or more people it should always be “you and I”.  Additionally, there is a type of odd snobbery that goes with saying “you and I” in obviously wrong situations.  I can’t say for certain why it’s such a prevalent (and nails on chalkboard reaction for many of us) error.  But it is, and as an English learner, you will be ahead of the game if you get this one right!

Alas, we can’t just stop there. Some people who just maybe understand that there is some “trick” going on here (subjects vs. objects) want to try to avoid making an error, and they incorrectly use the reflexive (myself/yourself) to try to avoid this issue altogether. WRONG!  Only I can do something to myself. Only YOU can do something to yourself. So if someone says “give it to my wife and myself” you will know that’s wrong.

If you can replace the people involved with “us”, then the proper usage is “you and me”.  If you need to replace the people with “we”, then it’s “you and I”. Ultimately, between “you and me” this is a fairly simple problem that “you and I” can avoid by using this little we/us test. And by doing that, we can also avoid talking about that nasty grammar stuff like subjects and objects 🙂