Me or I

Hello there,

This may be a rather different story, but I think it's somewhat related to the question you discuss, hopefully.  In a radio program, I remember, Professor Dennis Preston (Michigan State Univ.) said as follows... (I didn't pay much attention then, but now, I've gotten curious: do they sound too colloquial, perhaps?)

# Well, us socio-linguists have never been able to study upper-class accents very well.  We just don't have enough money...

# Now us linguists can still catch them.

...?

 

Ruslana wrote:

You know, it sounds kind of showing off to me. Of course I am not a native speaker, so you'd better wait for another opinion! Maybe it's acceptable in spoken speech, but I myself wouldn't use it.

Hello Ruslana.  Interesting!  (I thought so at first, from the tone of his voice ).   I find MrP's comment interesting, too.

MrPedantic wrote:

That's not to say that the substitution in this instance ("me" for "I") might not have its own function, which some speakers find useful. For instance, in BrE at least, "I" has acquired a slightly "overbearing" air, in some contexts (cf. the Queen's "My husband and I"). By fronting "me" in place of "I", in "me and Bill...", for instance, perhaps the speaker unconsciously puts himself in the background: perhaps "Bill and I" would seem too Queenly, to some speakers.

Bokeh, where did you find such information? (That it's a common mistake?)

Grammar Geek wrote:

Kooyeen, you seem to enjoy learning the rules of grammar and then deciding which ones to break. I cringe when people I considered to be well educated and professional use this. I really encourage you not to. To me, you will sound like an uneducated, unprofessional rube. Why not go whole hog and start saying "I seen it" too?

LOL, so you considered me well educated and professional, then you cringed... and now I'm a rube. Sounds good!
Come on, GG, I think you know the way I'm learning English, don't you? I'm not learning the rules and then decide to break them, it's more like "I try to pay attention to the way natives use English and learn as much as possible, so that I can then decide for myself what to say." It is obvious that to do so I need lots of advice, and from lots of people too. It's only this way that I can get the big picture and finally understand English.
As for "I seen it", I've never asked about that because I've never heard it often, so I think I don't need to spend much time on that, at least for now. But that "Me and somebody else", yep, I keep on hearing it. I remember I also heard it in a podcast that was supposed to be useful to ESL learners. It was "Learn English with Bob and Rob", or something like that. One of the two was British, the other was American. They talked about many different topics. I just listened to one podcast, I wasn't much interested, but I managed to hear a "Me and ..." used as subject. Wow! They were not 8-year-olds for sure.
Anyway, I believe you when you say that I'll never catch you using "me" as subject. If I'm not mistaken, I remeber you once said that you were happy when a sign in a store was changed from "10 items or less" to "10 items or fewer", and you also said that other people didn't care much about that change. This probably means that you really pay attention to certain rules, so it is understandable that you cringe when "me" is the subject. But what I'm saying is that if I hear something or I notice a certain feature in your language, I can't disregard it, as a learner of English as a second language.

Hey Feathers, I asked about "us + subject" in this forum some time ago, the result was that I was told it was not ok. But the problem is that you'll keep hearing that. And this problem is a problem only because someone says there's a problem, you know what I mean? In other words, according to some people or some rules, you'll keep on hearing wrong English. So don't ever turn on the TV or the radio to learn English, because it's wrong English after all! So just keep on reading grammar books... (NB: the last two sentences were said as a joke, you can and you actually should turn on your radio and TV)

I guess it's all.
Sorry to be so anti-prescriptive, sometimes I feel like I'm kind of subversive.

The numbers are a little misleading; since we can't see beyond google #999, we can never be sure that our search on "us three are" doesn't include examples such as:

1. ...many times greater than to the U.S.; three are...

2. We have eight Iraqi engineers working for us. Three are civil engineers...

3. The eyes of us three are the only ones to which she has yet revealed herself.

etc.

MrP