Correct Grammar (was Open Email to Yahoo Feedback/Try Yahoo Investor Relat

[Jennifer Piersol]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Tonks" <tonks_op at y...> wrote:
> 
> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "davewitley" 
> <dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> > 
> > Um, why is that bad grammar?  It's slightly better usage to 
> > say "Russell and me", but I don't think he violated any 
> grammatical 
> > rule, and there might be an extraneaous reason for the order he 
> used.
> > 
> 
> Tonks now:
> I know that younger people these days speak that way, but it is 
> WRONG. And I just hate to see the language go downhill like this.  

Well, it looks like Dave is a "descriptionist" type of linguist, and
Tonks is a "prescriptionist" type of linguist. :)

Uh, sorry.

Anyway, technically (and I do mean TECHNICALLY), there is nothing
wrong with the phrase "me and Russell" in the way it was used.  It's
not the "prescribed" way of speaking English correctly, but because
the two people in question were the objects of the sentence, and they
were in object form (instead of the incorrect "Russell and I", as per
Dave's observation), they are technically correct.  It may sound harsh
to our ears, but linguistically, they're fine.  

One of my pet peeves as a descriptionist (and I mean no offense here -
I'm competely irked by many things that are happening in written
English these days) is when people are saying the language is going
downhill.  Language is constantly changing.  Constantly.  I mean, we
don't speak Old/Middle English anymore, do we?  And our language would
be so much poorer without the additions we make every year to our
(darnit, I can't think of a better word than) vocabulary.

Now, if we could just teach people to stop using "'s" to denote
plurals!!!  That's just wrong! :)

-Jen, the descriptionist with certain prescriptionist tendencies.