Entertainment Television, also known as E Television, presents a feature each night dishing out to the starving masses the latest gossip and news surrounding the well-pronounced American celebrity culture. In one segment called The Daily 10, Debbie Matenopoulos, one of the show's three vibrant hosts, commented on soccer player David Beckham's supposed gratitude for a bash given for Beckham and his glamorous wife, known as Posh. Matenopoulos, who holds a degree in journalism from NYU, quoted the dashing soccer player in paraphrase:
"Thank you for throwing a little party for he and Posh" Matenopoulos had him saying.
Could Beckham have actually said in gratitude, had he said anything: "Thank you for throwing a little party for I and Posh?" He well might have. Nevertheless, he would have been wrong as was Matenopoulos in her paraphrase. Even in paraphrase object pronouns have their place. As we have seen before, even indirect object pronouns are required to be in the objective case. Therefore, the correct form: Thank you for throwing a little party for me and Posh. "Party" is the direct object, "me" and "her" (Posh) serve as indirect objects.
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2 comments:
You identify an alarming development in what I think of as pseudo-sophistation in current usage patterns.
I fear that Beckham's usage builds upon prepositional phrases such as "... between you and I..." in which "I" is intended to show savvy and sophistication, but is nevertheless wrong. This usage suggests that the coordinating conjunction "and" has morphed into a prepostition that always requires a subjective. Not even German recognizes this turn.
It seems, alas, that many of our coevals have succumbed to this incorrect usage, or are at least willing to tolerate it, fooled perhaps by the intervening "and." But Beckham has taken an astonishing leap forward that must not take root! He treats a humble preposition (for) as sufficient to require the subjective case, without assistance of the obfuscating conjuction.
Such pronoun infractions invariably grate upon my tender ears, as surely they would on those of Strunk and White!
"Case" of nouns and pronouns indicates their function: 1) subjective case, also called nominative case: the noun or pronoun functions as "doer" or "subject of"; 2) objective case, also called accusative (direct object) or dative (indirect object) of the verb; and 3) possessive, also called genitive, in which instances the noun or pronoun are showing ownership or possession of some sort.
A recent comment to the posting "Bending Beckham's Pronouns" of 7/26/2007, which should be read first, prompts the following response below, also in commentary form suggesting an explanation as to the reasons folks make blunders with their pronouns.
The argument goes that working class folks in England and parts of North America in the nineteenth century would be rightly corrected when putting an object pronoun in a subject position: "Me and Anthony will mop up." Some assert that the problem is mitigated when putting the other party in the compound subject first: "Anthony and I will mop up." That is, a tweaking of the syntax (order or words) will better cue the ear to make the right choice. Probably.
At any rate, if the lesson is presumably "overlearned," folks would then tend to "hyper correct." That is, they would tend to put the subject pronoun anywhere, including in the object position upon merely hearing and then falsely cueing on the word "and": "Anthony told Meg and I."
Makes sense to me.
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